I've spent twenty years at the intersection of narrative practice, critical theory, and organizational life — most of it inside institutions I was also trying to think critically about.

I'm a licensed marriage and family therapist and the founder and clinical director of California Family Institute, a nonprofit community counseling center I built from the ground up in Costa Mesa, California. I hold a PhD. I've trained therapists in narrative practice, supervised clinicians across career stages, and spent years at the edge of what therapeutic work can be when it takes culture seriously.

Before any of this, I was a founder. In 1996 I started Two Roads Professional Resources, a technology staffing company that I built to eight figures before exiting in 2009. The company has since been acquired by Motive Workforce Solutions. That experience — the building, the sustained ambiguity, the identity questions that come with scaling something, and eventually the passage out — is part of why I can work with entrepreneurs and founders without romanticizing what they’re doing. I know what it costs. I also know what it’s worth.

This space is the platform where all of that converges with my interests in futures thinking, cultural criticism, and the long tradition of working with people in liminal space. I host The Radical Therapist Podcast. I write the Liminal Lab Substack, where I think publicly about cultural architecture, narrative practice, and the structures that shape how we live. I co-edited An Encyclopedia of Radical Helping (Thick Press, 2024) and I’m releasing a book on contemporary narrative therapy with Routledge this fall.

I've also been a Zen practitioner for a long time. I teach at the Empty Moon Zen Sangha. That matters to this work in ways that are harder to describe in a bio — something about staying with discomfort, sitting in the dark until your eyes adjust, not rushing toward resolution. I've been in recovery for decades and spent years inside 12-step communities, which gave me an early and lasting education in what it looks like when transformation is actually happening versus when it's being performed.

My intellectual formation runs through narrative therapy, Bakhtin, Tony Fry's defuturing/futuring framework, Pierre Wack's scenario thinking, van Gennep's rites of passage, Hartmut Rosa’s resonance, Arturo Escobar’s pluriversal practice, and the long DIY tradition of building things outside institutional permission. Punk got there first.

I work from Orange County, California, and remotely across time zones.