My Story

From Therapy to Coaching (Short Version)

Ask a million “coaches” the difference between coaching and therapy, get a million answers.  Here’s mine. 

Therapists build a relationship with you for months and years to find the root causes of your symptoms and tailor their interventions to your complex needs. It is a beautiful, long and winding process. In contrast, as your coach, I help you identify specific, discrete symptoms, create clear goals and give you tools you need to meet those goals as quickly as possible. My work is short term, driven by action and complementary/supportive of a therapeutic practice.

I have been a software engineer, a patent litigator and then a DBT therapist for ten years specializing in Borderline Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disordr, C-PTSD, and other versions of severe emotion dysregulation. 

My Story

From Therapy to Coaching (Long Version)

Ask a million “coaches” the difference between coaching and therapy, get a million answers.  Here’s mine. 

Modern psychotherapy has taken on the medical model, for better or worse.  You go into a therapist’s office, tell them your symptoms and they diagnose you with a root cause: a traumatic event, intergenerational trauma, imbalanced brain chemistry, etc. Based on their diagnosis, they begin treatment whether it includes a referral to a psychiatrist for medication, a regimen of exposure therapy or an emotionally corrective therapeutic relationship and walking through your family history. This work is beautiful and I treasure my ten years as a therapist sorting through root causes and loving my clients through their transformations.

Then I got sick with an illness that has no known root cause. In 2024 I was diagnosed with Long Covid and Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome which either has no root cause, has an infinite number of various root causes or has a single root cause that has not yet been scientifically discovered yet. I became housebound, sleeping 15-18 hours per day and unable to engage in any daily activities other than caring for my two dogs.

My recovery took on two parallel tracks. The first track used the standard medical system, starting with my General Practitioner to get referrals to neurological, respiratory, and cardiac specialists, until finally landing at the Stanford Long Covid Clinic to try treatments meant to address each potential root cause, including chronic inflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction, MCAS and other theories. But in order for these specialists to be able to rule out each root cause confidently, I had to begin and end each treatment one at a time, slowly and methodically in a years-long process. Statistically, MECFS patients take 2-5 years to recover, if at all.

So in order to cobble together any kind of liveable existence, I also pursued a parallel track to target my symptoms regardless of root cause. First I addressed my air hunger. After one week of breathing exercises that required no diagnosis or root cause, I eliminated my simplest symptom. Then I tackled my POTS, first trying compression clothing and then a massive daily dose of electrolytes and salt. Again, I had no root cause diagnosis for my POTS symptoms but still successfully reduced the severity of my lightheadedness and dizziness just by addressing the symptom itself. For the next 12 months I used a strict regimen of pacing and aggressive rest and used various devices to track my sleep and heart rate to tackle my PEM crashes until I went from weekly rolling crashes to monthly crashes and finally, after almost two years, the rare crash after multiple days of activity. 

This is the difference between therapy and coaching. Therapists build a relationship with you for months and years to find the root causes of your symptoms and tailor their interventions to your complex needs. It is a beautiful, long winding process. In contrast, as your coach, I help you identify specific, discrete symptoms, create clear goals and give you tools you need to meet those goals as quickly as possible. My work is short term, driven by action and complimentary/supportive of a therapeutic practice.

I still sleep 15 hours per day and I have continued to pay attention to new medical research and try treatments for new potential root causes of Long Covid and ME/CFS. I truly hope to recover fully one day. But I could not have survived the process and even thrived had I not pursued the parallel path of addressing each specific symptom one by one until my life became livable again, even as I’m still recovering.  

My shift from therapy to coaching has been truly enjoyable. As a DBT therapist I had always incorporated a coaching style and now my expertise with complex mental health conditions and severe behavioral symptoms make me efficient at sorting through which issues need to be addressed with an in depth therapeutic relationship and which behaviors can be changed more quickly, allowing for your therapeutic journey to progress with even fewer obstacles. 

Education

The Wright Institute, Berkeley, CA
M.A., Counseling Psychology

Golden Gate University, San Francisco, CA
Industrial Organizational Psychology Certification