Community, Teaching & Research
Good therapy doesn’t stop at the office door. Alongside seeing clients, I teach, present research, and work to make mental health support more visible and less stigmatized in the community.
Community Outreach
A lot of people who could benefit from therapy never walk into an office. Some can’t afford it. Some don’t think it’s for them. Some were raised to believe asking for help is weakness. Meeting people where they already are changes that.
I volunteer with community programs that pair physical activity with mental health support — including Boxing Therapy, where movement becomes a way into conversations that might not happen sitting in a chair. It’s the same principle behind my research: the body and the mind aren’t separate projects.
Reducing stigma is part of the work. The more normal it looks to take care of your mental health, the more people actually do it.
Teaching Psychology
I teach psychology at the university level. Standing in front of a lecture hall keeps me honest — you can’t explain a concept clearly to a room of students unless you actually understand it, and questions from people encountering an idea for the first time have a way of exposing lazy thinking.
It also feeds directly back into therapy. Teaching means staying current with the research rather than relying on what I learned in graduate school, and it sharpens the skill that matters most in session: taking something complicated and making it make sense to the person in front of you.
Research
My research looks at what happens when you combine physical exercise with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. In a study of 205 adults, people doing both therapy and regular exercise reported meaningfully lower depression, anxiety, and stress than people doing only one or neither.
One finding stood out: exercising instead of going to therapy, or going to therapy instead of exercising, didn’t produce the same benefit. The combination is what mattered. That result shapes how I work — movement isn’t a substitute for therapy, but it’s rarely a bad addition to it.
I present this work to professional and community audiences, and I keep researching — because the field keeps moving, and clients deserve care based on what we know now, not what we knew a decade ago.
Work With Me
The same evidence-based approach behind the research shows up in every session.