PSYCHOTHERAPIST · AUTHOR · RESEARCHER

For more than a decade, I've sat with people in the places most approaches hurry past: the anxiety that won't resolve on schedule, the trauma that quietly shaped a life, the strange ache of not fitting one's own success. 

I founded The Primary Witness in 2012 to do this work the way I believe it should be done — slowly, relationally, and at depth.

I came to it by an unusual road. I'm originally from Brazil and have lived in the United States for over twenty years — long enough to know firsthand what it is to rebuild a self across a language, a culture, and a sense of belonging. That isn't a footnote to my practice; it's part of how I understand what it takes to stay whole under pressure.

Before private practice, I worked where the stakes were highest — emergency psychiatric services, addiction treatment, jail-based behavioral health, and a veterans center. I've spent years with trauma and PTSD, including military sexual trauma and traumatic brain injury, and with the neurobiology of attachment and stress. That ground is still under everything I do.

I also teach what I practice — Adjunct Faculty and a Clinical Supervisor at Naropa University in Contemplative Psychology, a member of the Denver Psychoanalytic Society, and completing a PhD in the science of stress and resilience at Saybrook, studying how psychological flexibility shapes who adapts well under sustained pressure and who doesn't.

My training isn't only clinical. I've spent more than twenty years in Buddhist meditation, and I teach meditation, yoga, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, scuba, and free-diving. These aren't hobbies set apart from the work — they're where I've learned, in my own body, what it means to stay present and regulated when things get hard.