My Story

Social work found me before I fully understood what it would ask of me. Working in New York City schools, I watched bright, capable boys get labeled as "difficult" when what they actually needed was someone to teach them what to do with everything they were feeling. I watched men carry decades of pain they were never given permission to name, let alone process.

TherapyForUsByUs exists because of those rooms. Because culturally responsive care isn't a buzzword to me, it's the difference between someone showing up to therapy once and someone actually staying long enough to heal. It's the difference between a school program that checks a box and one that changes how a building feels for the kids inside it.

What I learned in schools is that prevention and connection matter as much as treatment. What I learned sitting across from men who'd never felt safe enough to speak is that healing isn't private, it's communal. People heal in connection with other people, not in isolation from them.

That belief is why this work has grown beyond a private practice. With experience in both school-based and clinical settings, I've come to care most about bridging micro and macro social work/ the one-on-one work of sitting with a person in crisis, and the larger work of building systems, programs, and partnerships that change what's available to a whole community before crisis hits. It's why TherapyForUsByUs is therapy, and it's also speaking, training, consulting, and community programming including mentorship for young men of color and youth empowerment initiatives focused on resilience and leadership because the goal has never been just to treat symptoms. It's to build the conditions where healing can actually take root: in families, in schools, in organizations, in communities.