ABOUT ME

I was born in Buffalo, in upstate New York to a family of Italian and Irish immigrant background. After graduating from Canisius College, (Buffalo) with a joint degree in English Literature and Gender Studies, I decided that I wanted to pursue a more 'hands-on' field. Drawn to the study of myth and comparative religion, I enrolled in graduate school to seek a career in cultural anthropology.

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Roughly the next ten years of my life were spent studying anthropology in New York City, as well as teaching courses in gender and sexuality at Parsons School of Design. I completed my Masters at the City University of New York [CUNY], before moving to the New School for Social Research for doctoral studies.

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Towards the end of my training as an anthropologist, I realised that my goal for more 'hands-on' involvement with people was no closer to realisation in anthropology than in literature. Now, instead of talking to students about famous authors, I was standing in the front of a classroom lecturing students on how people interacted (most typically, how they interacted sexually). Shortly before the time I sat for my doctoral exams, an important scholar of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Slavoj Žižek, came to lecture at my university. Like many others, I sat spellbound on the floor of a dusty classroom, totally enthralled by what I was hearing. I knew that I would have to leave anthropology for a field in which I felt I could possibly make a difference in people's lives. Thus began what has become a passionate life-interest in the theory and practice of psychotherapy.

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Subsequently, after I moved to the west of Ireland in 2000, I enrolled at TRACHT, the Centre for Biodynamic and Integrative Psychotherapy in Kinvara, Co. Galway. Because I came from such a strongly academic background, the training's emphasis on the body, group process and experiential (rather than theoretical) work was incredibly stimulating as well as incredibly challenging. In conjunction with many years of psychotherapy in several different traditions (including psychoanalysis, Integrative, Biodynamic and Gestalt therapy) both here and in New York, my training at Tracht certainly managed to locate, then dislocate, many of my blindspots.

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After my training was complete in 2006, I based by practice in Kilcolgan, Co. Galway for the next 14 years.

Due to the Covid crisis, I decided to re-locate my practice to a purpose-built consulting room adjacent to my home in the Caher Valley, just outside Lisdoonvarna in County Clare.

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I am a fully accredited member of IAHIP, the Irish Association for Humanistic and Integrative Psychotherapy, and continue to write, study, and train both in Ireland and abroad in the many clinical issues presented in my work as a psychotherapist.

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Since 2017, the supervision of other therapists in clinical practice has become a central focus of my psychotherapy practice.

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I am still invigorated and hopeful that each day I may go some way to making a real difference in the lived quality of people's lives and assist them as they seek to heal, expand and explore their boundless human potential...

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