At 16, I was a multi-sport scholarship athlete — four sports, college scholarships in hand, a clear sense of who I was and exactly where I was going. A devastating accident left me paralyzed from the waist down overnight. 18 months of rehabilitation just to walk again.

The physical recovery was grueling and visible. What came after was harder and invisible: the search for purpose once the athlete identity was gone, the deep disorientation that comes when the future you've built your entire identity around simply disappears, the silence of a world that didn't have language for what I was experiencing.

No therapist I saw had a framework for that specific intersection — the identity collapse that follows the loss of athletic self. No protocol addressed the psychological dimensions of what I was going through. The gap between physical recovery and psychological recovery wasn't just wide. It was unaddressed.

That gap became the direction of the next 15 years of my life. I became a licensed clinician. I trained in EMDR and trauma resolution. I pursued advanced training in addiction. I enrolled in a doctoral program in Performance Psychology to research the exact questions no one answered for me when I needed it most. And I built a practice specifically designed to close the gap I fell into.

Every credential I hold exists because I needed it — and because my clients need it. Not because it looked good. Because the athletes I work with deserve a practitioner who has been in the fire and built something real out of it.