I've spent more than twenty years in the trenches of clinical practice, and if there's one thing that time teaches you, it's this: addiction doesn't care about your resume, your bank account, or how put-together you look on a Tuesday morning. It finds people where they are.
I'm a licensed independent psychotherapist based here in Boston, Massachusetts, and I've built my career around one of the hardest problems in mental health — substance use disorders. But I don't just treat addiction. I work with people navigating an array of circumstances and challenges, because the truth is that substance use rarely exists in a vacuum. It's tangled up with trauma, anxiety, relationship breakdowns, legal trouble, the whole messy human condition.
What separates me from a lot of practitioners isn't just the number of years I've logged — though two decades is no small thing. It's that I bring teaching and research into my clinical work every single day. I don't rely on intuition alone. I rely on what the evidence actually says works, and I hold myself accountable to that standard.
Why Substance Abuse Treatment Is Different
Substance abuse isn't a moral failing. It's not weakness. It's a complex condition that rewires the brain, and treating it requires someone who understands both the neuroscience and the humanity involved.
My specialization runs deep. I provide comprehensive substance use treatment, but I also handle the forensic side of things that most therapists never touch. Courts send me cases. The RMV (that's the Registry of Motor Vehicles here in Massachusetts) calls on me for evaluations. DCF — the Department of Children and Families — relies on my assessments. Employment security clearance processes bring me in too.
What does that mean for you? It means I can provide diagnostic impressions and risk-of-recidivism analysis that hold up under scrutiny. When a judge is deciding whether someone gets treatment instead of jail time, my word matters. When an employer needs to know if a candidate is fit for a safety-sensitive position, I'm the one who figures that out. That breadth of experience makes me unusually well-equipped to understand the full scope of what addiction does to a person's life — not just their health, but their freedom, their family, their career.
Evidence-Based Treatment: The Methods That Actually Work
I don't believe in woo. I don't dabble in approaches that sound nice but haven't earned their keep in controlled studies. Every method I use has been tested, validated, and proven to produce real outcomes. Here's what that looks like in practice.
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
This is the workhorse of addiction treatment, and for good reason. CBT gives you structured one-on-one sessions where we actively work to reshape the negative thought patterns that keep you trapped in the cycle of substance use. We identify triggers — those specific situations, emotions, or environments that pull you back toward old habits — and we build concrete coping mechanisms to handle them. It's not about positive thinking. It's about building real, usable skills that prevent relapse when the pressure is on.
Motivational Interviewing
Let's be honest: not everyone walks into treatment wanting to change. Some people are dragged in by a court order, a spouse's ultimatum, or hitting rock bottom. They're hostile. They're resistant. They don't believe they have a problem.
Motivational Interviewing was designed exactly for this population. It builds on a person-centered approach — I meet you where you are, not where I think you should be — and it incentivizes behavior change from the inside out. Instead of pushing, I help you find your own reasons for changing. It's surprisingly effective, even with patients who walk in ready to fight the whole process.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)
DBT is one of those approaches that sounds abstract until you see it work. It focuses on four core skill areas: mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness. For people with substance use disorders, these skills are lifesaving.
Think about it. Most relapses happen in moments of intense emotional distress — anger, shame, loneliness, boredom. DBT gives you the tools to sit with that discomfort without acting on it. You learn to regulate your emotions instead of being regulated by them. And you learn how to show up differently in relationships, which is huge because isolation is one of the biggest relapse triggers out there.
Experiential Therapy
Sometimes talk therapy just doesn't reach the parts of you that hold the trauma. That's where experiential therapy comes in — hands-on learning through art therapy, music therapy, equine therapy, or adventure therapy. These modalities bypass the rational mind and let you process subconscious thoughts and emotions that have been buried for years.
I've watched people who couldn't say a word about their pain in traditional therapy break through completely while painting, playing music, or working alongside a horse. It's not magic. It's neuroscience — different pathways to the same healing.
EMDR and Trauma Processing
You cannot treat addiction effectively without addressing trauma, because the two are inextricably linked for the vast majority of my clients. EMDR — Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing — is an eight-phase treatment that combines guided eye movements with trauma processing.
The research here is compelling: over thirty positive controlled outcomes studies support its effectiveness. EMDR helps your brain reprocess traumatic memories so they no longer trigger the fight-or-flight response that often drives substance use. If you've been using drugs or alcohol to numb painful memories, EMDR gives you a path to actually heal those wounds instead of just managing the symptoms.
Treatment Doesn't Happen in a Vacuum
Family Treatment Approach
Addiction doesn't just affect the individual. It ripples through entire families — spouses, children, parents, siblings. The family treatment approach broadens our focus from the person in front of me to the entire family system. Because here's what I've learned in twenty years: if you treat the individual but ignore the family dynamics that enabled or were damaged by the addiction, recovery is far harder to sustain.
Relapse Prevention
Relapse prevention isn't a separate phase of treatment — it's woven into everything we do. It's a skills-based CBT approach where we identify your specific triggers and develop personalized coping tools before you ever leave my office. The goal isn't to create someone who never faces temptation. The goal is to create someone who has the skills to handle it when they do.
Twelve-Step Facilitation
I'm not going to pretend that AA or NA works for everyone. But for many people, community support is the difference between lasting recovery and a revolving door of treatment episodes. Twelve-step facilitation is an engagement strategy — it helps you connect with the recovery community, find sponsors, attend meetings, and build a support network that exists outside of therapy. It's not religion. It's infrastructure.
Evaluation Services: The Forensic Side of Practice
Not every person who walks through my door is seeking treatment for themselves. Some are court-ordered. Some need evaluations for professional licensing. Some need to prove to a judge, an employer, or a regulatory body that they're safe to return to certain responsibilities.
I provide diagnostic impressions and risk-of-recidivism analysis that are rigorous, evidence-based, and defensible. When I write an evaluation, it's grounded in clinical data, standardized assessment tools, and years of pattern recognition that only comes from two decades of this work. I don't give people passes they haven't earned, and I don't unfairly penalize people who are genuinely in recovery.
This forensic work has made me sharper as a clinician. When you know your assessments can affect someone's freedom, their career, or their children, you hold yourself to an exacting standard. And that standard benefits everyone I treat.
Online-Only Services: Access Without Barriers
I offer online-only services, and I mean that as a feature, not a compromise. Substance use disorders carry enormous stigma, and for a lot of people, walking into a therapist's office in person feels like admitting defeat. Online sessions remove that barrier.
You can work with me from the privacy of your own home, on your schedule, without having to explain yourself to anyone at a reception desk. For people in recovery who are still building their support network, that privacy is essential. And let me be clear: the quality of treatment doesn't diminish because we're not in the same room. The evidence supports it, and my clinical experience confirms it.
The Bottom Line
Recovery is possible. I've seen it, again and again, over more than twenty years of practice. But it requires the right approach — one that's evidence-based, comprehensive, and tailored to the whole person. It requires a therapist who understands both the science of addiction and the humanity of the people struggling with it.
If you're in Boston or anywhere else in Massachusetts and you're ready to do the work, I'm here. The first step is always the hardest. But you don't have to take it alone.
Sources
- Psychology Today Boston Therapist Directory — Substance Abuse category: psychologytoday.com/us/therapists/ma/boston?category=substance-abuse
- NAATP Evidence-Based Treatment Methods: naatp.org/treatment-methods-evidence-based-practices