I was fortunate to grow up in a stable home where I felt loved, nurtured, and secure. At that age, I assumed everyone's home was probably a lot like mine.
One day at school, a friend mentioned that he had to go to his dad's house for the weekend. I didn't understand what he meant. As we talked, I learned that his parents were divorced. He told me how much it hurt him to see them fight and how difficult it was having to go back and forth between their homes.
I don't remember everything about that conversation, but I remember the thought that has never left my mind:
“I want to help people have less painful relationships.”
Of course, I had no idea what that meant for my life. I was in the fourth grade. But looking back, I can see that something took root in me that day—a curiosity about relationships and a desire to understand why the people who matter most to us can also become sources of such deep pain.
Years later, that question would find me again.
When Caring Wasn't Enough
My first professional path led me into theology and pastoral ministry.
Faith had always been important to me, and ministry gave me the opportunity to walk alongside people during some of the most significant moments of their lives. But I quickly discovered that ministry also meant sitting with people in the middle of very complicated human problems.
Individuals came to me with personal struggles. Couples came with marriages in distress. Parents came concerned about their children. Families were dealing with conflict, grief, trauma, and circumstances that couldn't be resolved with a sermon, a simple prayer, or a few encouraging words.
I cared deeply about the people sitting across from me.
But sometimes caring wasn't enough.
I remember becoming increasingly aware that people were trusting me with problems I didn't feel adequately equipped to address. I could listen. I could pray with them. I could offer pastoral support. But I wanted to understand more about how people function, how relationships work, why families become stuck in destructive patterns, and what actually helps people change.
That realization eventually led me to marriage and family therapy.
Becoming a therapist gave me a new set of lenses. I began learning to look not only at individuals, but at relationships, families, patterns, systems, and the ways our experiences shape how we respond to one another.
For years, the question that had begun in fourth grade remained at the center of my work:
How do we help people develop healthier relationships?
Then another conversation expanded the question.
What If You Only Have Five Minutes?
A few years into my work in the mental health field, I remember talking with a colleague who had been working in a refugee camp in Jordan.
As they described the enormous mental health needs they were encountering, my clinical mind immediately went to work. I started thinking about the kinds of interventions that might help and talking about what we could do for people experiencing trauma, loss, displacement, and emotional distress.
My colleague listened and then said something that stopped me:
“We only had about five minutes with each patient.”
Five minutes.
Most of what I had been trained to do assumed something very different. Therapy assumed time. It assumed trained professionals. It assumed a setting where someone could sit with a therapist for an hour and return the following week.
But what happens when those assumptions don't exist?
What happens when hundreds—or thousands—of people need support and there simply aren't enough mental health professionals to provide it?
What can you give someone in five minutes that might actually help?
That conversation changed the way I thought about mental health.
I began asking a different question. Instead of only asking, “How do we help this person?” I became increasingly interested in asking, “How do we build the capacity of communities to help people?”
That question eventually became an important part of my work in global and community mental health.
It has taken me into schools, churches, healthcare systems, and communities in the United States and internationally. It has led me to think differently about who can provide mental health support, where that support can happen, and how psychological knowledge can be translated into practical tools that people can use to help themselves and one another.
Along the way, something else became increasingly clear to me:
Resilience isn't simply an individual characteristic. We develop it within ourselves, but we also develop it through our relationships and communities.
The Thread I Can See Now
Looking back, I can see a thread connecting experiences that once seemed unrelated.
A fourth-grade conversation taught me that relationships can be a source of both tremendous security and tremendous pain.
Pastoral ministry taught me that faith and good intentions matter deeply—but that people also need practical skills for navigating complex emotional and relational problems.
Marriage and family therapy taught me to see people within the context of their relationships and the systems around them.
And global mental health work taught me that helping one person at a time will never be enough. If we want healthier people and healthier families, we also have to build healthier, more resilient communities.
Those experiences have shaped the work I do today.
My work is centered on helping people grow within themselves, deepen their relationship with God, strengthen their relationships with others, and contribute to healthier, more resilient communities.
Through education, speaking, training, coaching, and research, I help individuals, couples, families, and communities build the inner capacity, practical skills, and supportive connections they need to navigate and nurture the most important and meaningful relationships in their lives.
The settings have changed considerably since that conversation in fourth grade.
The question really hasn't.
How can we help people build relationships that become sources of connection, strength, healing, and resilience—even in the middle of life's storms?
That's the question I have spent much of my life pursuing.
And it's the work I continue to pursue today.