The Work Behind the Work
I came to this work because I needed it first. I've spent years around men who were competent at nearly everything and quietly stuck on the one thing that mattered most — and I've been that man. What I found was that the sticking point is almost never a missing skill. It's a story running underneath the choices, usually one formed early, usually one nobody ever named out loud.
So that's what I do. I'm a certified storywork coach trained through the ReStory Institute, a writer on formation and masculine life, and a graduate student in clinical mental health counseling. I bring structure, hard questions, and enough patience to let the real thing surface instead of rushing to fix what's on the surface. I'm Reformed by conviction, which shapes how I understand persons and change — it doesn't mean I'll preach at you, and you're free to disagree with me about anything.
The Tradition I Work In
The work itself is storywork. We go to the story underneath the thing you brought — where it started, what it was protecting you from, what it's costing you now. Not to excavate for its own sake, but because a story you can see is a story you can stop obeying. I trained in this through the ReStory Institute, Levels One and Two, in the lineage of Dan Allender's narrative-focused work. You'll leave sessions with something to carry: a question, a practice, a conversation you've been avoiding. It's structured but not scripted, and it moves at the pace the material actually requires rather than the pace either of us would prefer.
The frame around it comes from older sources. Martin Shaw and Michael Meade taught me that myth isn't decoration — it's the compressed record of what men have always had to walk through, and a man without a story to stand inside will improvise a worse one. Augustine and Aquinas gave me ordo amoris: the idea that most of our trouble is loving real goods in the wrong order rather than wanting bad things. Lewis and Malcolm Guite keep the imagination from going thin. Curt Thompson and Dan Allender insist the body and the wound are part of the account. And Philip Rieff and Carl Trueman keep me honest about the water we're swimming in — a culture that has made the self its own authority and then wondered why the self buckled under the weight.