About Alex
MSW, Hypnotherapist and Somatic Coach
I facilitate transformative men's work and offer individual hypnotherapy and coaching sessions for people who feel out of place socially, whether you find yourself withdrawing into the safety of your own mind or constantly caring for others while your own needs go neglected.
I help my clients welcome their emotions, restore their sense of worth and power, and experience deep connection without having to hide or perform.
Together, we work to relax the oppressive cultural norms you’ve carried, reclaiming your capacity to fully and safely express who you are.
“We spend our first twenty years deciding which parts of ourselves to put in the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again." -Robert Bly
What I Believe
I believe that recovering our authentic selves is some of the most important work we can do. In order to accommodate the limits of our early environments and our culture, most of us had to adopt strategies that masked our true aliveness. We brilliantly sought love and safety through being sweet, powerful, or detached. But it is exhausting to try to be a perfect, ideal self, and it ultimately blocks the type of love we most want. This work is about understanding those automated survival strategies, stepping back to process the emotions that drive them, and finding a more natural, genuine way of being.
My Struggle
After the societal pressure of getting into college subsided, I had the time and space to experience a profound existential crisis. Looking at all the suffering in the world, I found myself asking, “What is the point of life?” I wanted something deeper than a surface-level life, but I felt disconnected from any authentic motivation. There was a chronic sense of aloneness, sadness, and an uncomfortable, aching emptiness. Judgment of myself and others kept me isolated and made true intimacy hard to sustain. Ultimately, it was this emotional pain that catalyzed my quest for a more meaningful way of living.
My Path
During my first year in college, a friend invited me to a Vedic meditation class. While doing a gratitude meditation, authentic feelings of love welled up, and tears poured out as I contemplated all the people who had touched my life. For the first time I intentionally cultivated an inner state and learned how powerful these techniques could be in changing my internal emotional landscape.
This pursuit continued with Bible study, a class on Hinduism, a month living in a monastery in Taiwan, and a series of 10-day Vipassana meditation courses. By my last year of college, I devoted myself to intensive practice, which led me to live as a monk in Thailand for almost a year. Eventually, I returned to America to seek more opportunities for service, relational connection, and intellectual growth.
Professional Training
My interest in the subconscious mind led me to study hypnotherapy at the Alchemy Institute of Hypnosis in Santa Rosa, CA. During this course, I learned how to process early childhood trauma and apply deep trance work to emotional issues.
It was during this time that I was introduced to the concept of developmental survival strategies—the idea that certain early childhood experiences lead to recognizable attitudes, body postures, and relationship patterns.
This was a crucial missing piece for me. I recognized the chronic emptiness I experienced as the Attunement Survival Strategy. It explained my tendency toward depression, my search for relief in external things, and my habit of holding on to past relationships. When early needs for emotional attunement go unmet, we are likely to internalize beliefs like: “My needs don't matter. If I express my needs, I will be a burden. I don't deserve to have my needs met.”
To deepen my understanding, I completed a three-year training at the Seattle School of Body-Psychotherapy. Through this somatic work, I uncovered another layer of my own internal landscape: the Connection Survival Strategy.
This was harder to see because it operates as an automatic process of dissociation, pulling us up into our intellect to hide underlying fears. People with this pattern want connection just like anyone else, but their nervous system is unconsciously terrified of it.
My long-held interest in therapy began with a psychology major at Pomona College and eventually led me to a three-year Master of Social Work program. Alongside two-year-long clinical internships, this formal education deeply grounded my practice in psychodynamic and family systems theory. It provided a vital framework for understanding how intergenerational dynamics, historical contexts, and social forces shape individual suffering.
Today, my practice weaves these threads together. My practice is dedicated to helping others navigate these exact same strategies, moving out of chronic self-neglect and intellectualization, and back into a vibrant, embodied life. I combine the structural understanding of family systems and intergenerational dynamics with the profound depth of somatic hypnotherapy. Whether we are exploring the historical patterns you inherited or gently working with your nervous system to make intimacy feel safe, my goal is to help you move out of chronic self-neglect and intellectualization. Together, we can create the space for you to reclaim your right to have needs and build a vibrant, embodied life.
