About
I work with members of the military community and their families—those for whom service has shaped not only circumstance but character, relationships, and the experience of self. The psychological life of military service is particular: the prolonged separations, the demands of operational culture, and the difficulties of return. Reintegration is not only logistical; it asks something of identity, of attachment, and of the relational systems that absence reshapes, and return does not simply restore.
Operational stress injuries, including post-traumatic presentations, speak to the ways in which exposure to the extremes of human experience leaves its mark on the nervous system and the psyche alike in terms of what can be felt, remembered, and endured in the presence of others. Moral injury is a wound to the conscience as much as to the self, and one that conventional trauma frameworks do not always reach. Traumatic brain injury introduces further complexity where the neurological and psychological are difficult to disentangle: changes in affect, cognition, and relational capacity may be simultaneously organic and emotionally meaningful, and the person who has returned may feel estranged from a self they cannot fully account for. For families, the impact of service is felt in how absence and uncertainty shape attachment, relational patterns, and family structure in ways that carry their own weight and are not peripheral to the work but central to it.