I offer mental health coaching grounded in peer work and Internal Family Systems
Who This Work Is For
I work with people who experience extreme states, often labeled as ‘serious mental illness’. I can help you relate to these experiences with clarity, care, and agency.
What I Do
I offer private sessions for individuals and groups, training and consultation for practitioners, and teaching.
As a young man, I spent years moving in and out of psychiatric hospitals, heavily medicated, diagnosed and pathologized.
In 2002 I began writing publicly about my experiences, and co-founded The Icarus Project. My private practice grew directly out of that lineage.
I’ve been working in peer support, mental health, and social justice spaces for over twenty years. My work has focused on creating containers where people can question dominant narratives of “illness” and “wellness”. I’m especially drawn to working with people who don’t feel like they fit neatly into modern systems, and who sense that their intensity or difference carries both pain and possibility. I believe these experiences matter—not just for individual healing, but for how we imagine care, responsibility, and society more broadly.
[Read more about my education and training]
A Relational Practice
This work is held within a wide field of relationship. I’m in ongoing conversation with peers, elders, mental health workers, psychiatrists, psychodynamic therapists, somatic practitioners, artists, organizers, and fellow travelers, many of whom live and work outside dominant norms of family, identity, and belonging. I’m also in relationship with people who care for and stand alongside those who struggle, including parents, partners, chosen family, and community members doing their best in conditions shaped by fear, precarity, and control. I don’t hold authority alone; I’m held in it, challenged, and sometimes corrected by people I trust, and writing is one way I stay accountable to my own limits while practicing care and resistance in an increasingly rigid world.
I write regularly about IFS, peer work, intensity, and collective care in my Substack publication, Underground Transmissions.