How I Work.

This page is for people who want to understand the architecture of the Serendipitous Universe, whether we've already started working together or you're still looking to learn more before buying. You don't need to read it to work with me, but if you're the kind of person who thinks better when you know what something is built from, this is where that lives.

The foundation is pattern recognition developed under real-life pressure.

I've always loved puzzles and thought experiments, and life presented me with countless opportunities to practice unraveling the story that hid beneath the surface of people's words and proclamations. I learned early on that what was being said often wasn't the whole story. I learned to track the shift in energy when a conversation turned—the moment before the tension became visible—because missing it cost me many relationships over the years.

That skill came from hard lessons, first. The training came later, and it sharpened what was already there.

What I trained in, and what each thing actually gave me.

Gurdjieff's 4th Way—early childhood through adolescence

I grew up inside my parents' world of 4th Way practice; self-observation, pattern recognition, work as purposeful even in the most mundane moment, and the sustained effort to see unconscious behavior in real time, including your own. I didn't choose this, nor did I ever study it. I swam in it. Which means it shaped the way I pay attention before I ever had a framework for what attention was.

What it gave me: the capacity to witness without immediately reacting. The habit of asking what's actually happening here, underneath what appears to be happening.

Mediation—age 13

I learned formal mediation as a young teenager. An introductory workshop facilitated at my middle school, I took a shine to the entire process and immediately tried putting the tools into practice—holding space between two people in conflict, helping each one hear the other without collapsing into defense.

What it gave me: the structural understanding of how conflict actually moves, and the early conviction that the goal of a hard conversation is never to win it.

The 'Agoras' of Swiss camps—teens & early 20s

These were collective gatherings held inside of the dozens of sleepaway camps I attended, both as a kid and as a counselor. We used what I grew up calling 'agora,' a circle where everyone had a dedicated opportunity to speak, or pass, and where we practiced some basic rules of communication: speak in the first person, only for yourself, don't speak directly to someone you might be talking about in your story, and wait your turn to express yourself, holding the space with the greatest presence you can even as you just listen.

We used these circles for daily check-ins and to run the group through the day's activities—when on an international adventure, we'd work through the logistics of our next step on a trip, or the tour options when we'd stopped for a night somewhere.
We used these circles for conflict mediation and resolving major differences inside of the group—when conflict between two kids escalated enough to affect the whole group somehow, it was addressed inside an agora. With some groups, we reached emotional breakthrough, education on neurological differences, and moments of true connection amongst the kids.

What it gave me: the language infrastructure that runs underneath everything I do. When I ask a client to say it again, differently, I'm often listening for where the NVC distinction lives and what shifts when they find it.

NLP — trained with Mind Oasis LLC, a subsidiary of Transform Destiny

Neurolinguistic programming is concerned with the relationship between language, thought, and behavior —specifically how changing one changes the others. My training at Mind Oasis gave me a set of precise tools for working with exactly that: the way the words someone uses to describe their experience are actively constructing that experience, not just reporting it.

What it gave me: the practical methodology underneath the philosophical commitment. The techniques for actually shifting the relationship to an experience, not just naming that a shift is possible. It's the teaching that gave me permission to start working with clients when my daughter was four months old. 

Hypnosis

Hypnosis works with the layer of processing that runs below conscious deliberation. It's not what most people picture, it's closer to a guided narrowing of attention, a guided meditation, that allows suggestion and reframe to land somewhere the analytical mind usually intercepts. The first thing I tell new clients is that all hypnosis is self-hypnosis. It only works if you want to let it.

What it gave me: access to the part of the work that words alone can't reach. I use it carefully and contextually—as a tool available when the moment calls for it, rather than a signature technique.

TIME Technique

TIME Technique, or Timeline work, operates on the understanding that our relationship to past events isn't fixed. That how we hold a memory, where we locate it in our sense of time, and what meaning we've attached to it are all malleable. And that shifting those things shifts how the event continues to influence the present. It's a tool that I've explored three- and four-dimensionally with clients, and it's facilitated clarity, alignment, and breakthroughs.

What it gave me: a concrete methodology for the core of what I do, which is working with the relationship to experience rather than the experience itself.

Zegg Forum Facilitation

Forum is the practice I describe elsewhere on this site in detail. Finding it felt like recognition — like: this is the thing. This is what I actually do, given a structure.

What it gave me: a home for the embodied, witnessed, relational work that had been happening in my sessions without a name.

On intuition.

The title Relationship Intuitive is accurate in a way that Relationship Coach or Relationship Therapist isn't.

I intuit. I sense the place where the real tension lives before it's been articulated. I hear the emotion underneath the emotion. I notice what you reach toward and what you pull back from before you're aware you're doing it.

This is pattern recognition operating at speed, informed by a lifetime of paying very close attention to how people move through difficulty. It's also, sometimes, something beyond that...something that lives in the quiet, in the space between what's been said and what's about to be. I don't fully explain that part most of the time. I just work with it.

You don't need to believe in any of it for it to be useful. What you'll notice is that something gets named that you hadn't been able to name. That's where the work begins.

On semantics and pragmatics.

I am genuinely interested in language as the mechanism through which we construct our experience of reality.

Semantics is concerned with what words mean. Pragmatics is concerned with what words do—how they function in context, what they accomplish between people, what they close down or open up.

I work at both levels simultaneously. When I ask you to say something differently, I'm not correcting your grammar or criticising your word choices, much less telling you what your story is. I'm listening for what the reframe does; whether it shifts the weight, changes the relationship to the experience, or opens a door that the original phrasing had closed.

This is why the words you choose matter in the work. Not because there are right or wrong words, but because the ones you're using are actively shaping what's available to you.