Sex addiction therapy online and in Toronto
I never imagined becoming a therapist. I wanted to be a baseball player.
For me, the baseball field became a place of creativity, discipline, and timing. I became fascinated by the strange geometry of hitting: taking a round bat, meeting a round ball, and somehow hitting it square.
It shouldn’t really be possible. And yet, when everything comes together at precisely the right moment, it is.
That idea has stayed with me.
Much of my life’s work has involved going toward situations that can initially feel impossible—addiction that has resisted treatment, relationships devastated by betrayal, the aftermath of sexual trauma and human trafficking, and sexual behaviours that have crossed into offending.
I didn’t set out to build a career in sex, addiction, trauma, love, and relationships. Eventually, however, it became clear that this was where my abilities, experiences, and curiosity came together.
My earliest experiences with therapy actually left me skeptical of it. Growing up, I attended some of my mother’s appointments as she lived with schizophrenia. I remember therapists who seemed able to listen but, from my perspective as a child, didn’t seem able to create much change.
That experience stayed with me. Years later, it helped shape a fundamental belief about my own work: listening matters, but listening isn’t enough.
While training with a psychoanalyst from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), I learned that I possessed what were described to me as hyper-empathy, hyper-intuition, and hyper-anticipation—capacities associated with growing up as the child of a parent with schizophrenia.
Suddenly, parts of my childhood made more sense.
Growing up with my mother’s illness required me to become extraordinarily attentive to subtle changes in emotion, behaviour, and the environment around me. I learned to notice what wasn’t being said, anticipate what might happen next, and recognize shifts that other people might miss.
Understanding this also changed the way I understood my mother. Alongside the difficulties her illness brought into our lives, I developed capacities that would eventually become important to the work I do today. In an unexpected way, that realization gave me a deeper sense of gratitude toward her.
Those abilities are particularly valuable because my clinical work often takes me into places where human behaviour is complicated.
I have worked with people struggling with sex and multiple addictions, individuals who have committed sexual offences, survivors of sexual abuse and human trafficking, betrayed partners, and couples trying to rebuild after profound ruptures of trust. I have also brought my clinical expertise into legal settings as an expert witness in Canada, the United States, and immigration court.
These are circumstances in which I believe a therapist needs to be able to hold two things at once: deep empathy and uncompromising accountability.
Understanding someone’s behaviour does not mean excusing it. And holding someone accountable does not require abandoning our curiosity about how they became the person sitting in front of us.
That balance has become central to my work.
My work has also taken me beyond traditional clinical practice.
I have appeared as a mental health expert in an eight-part television series focused on men’s mental health, and my work and practice have received multiple forms of recognition for innovation, clinical impact, and leadership in mental health.
Those honours include the Brainz 500 Global Award, CREA Global Award, Canadian Choice Award for Therapy in Toronto, Brainz Executive Contributor recognition, multiple Best Customized Therapy Practice awards, and recognition by Toronto’s Best Rated for addiction counselling and couples therapy.
I appreciate those awards. But they aren’t why I do this work.
What matters to me is what happens when someone sits across from me believing their behaviour, trauma, addiction, relationship—or sometimes their entire life—has become impossible to change.
That’s where I return to the lesson baseball taught me years ago.
Sometimes something that looks impossible simply requires a different way of seeing it, the right approach, and the willingness to keep working until everything finally connects.
A round bat. A round ball.
And somehow, we hit it square.
