Early in my career, I worked extensively with people experiencing severe eating disorders. While I valued the evidence-based approaches I was using at the time, I found myself asking an important question: why were some people improving while others continued to struggle despite everyone’s best efforts? Again and again, I noticed that many of the people I worked with carried profound emotional pain beneath the surface. Their symptoms made sense in the context of their lives, yet I felt the therapies available to me were often helping people manage symptoms rather than fully understand and resolve them.

Everything changed when I attended my first workshop in Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP). It was one of those rare moments where something immediately clicked. Rather than focusing only on symptoms, ISTDP sought to understand the emotional conflicts, unconscious patterns, and protective strategies that had developed over a lifetime. It offered a compassionate way of making sense of suffering while helping people create genuine and lasting change. I knew I had found the approach I had been searching for, and I haven’t looked back since.

Over the years, my work has naturally evolved towards supporting people with the most complex presentations — individuals who have often experienced significant trauma, struggled in relationships, lived with persistent emotional or physical symptoms, or felt that previous therapy hadn’t quite reached the heart of the problem. I don’t see complexity as something to fear. More often than not, it reflects a person’s remarkable capacity to survive difficult experiences using the best strategies available to them at the time.