I see a small number of people independent of my work in the hospital. You do not have to be religious for this to be useful, and you do not have to explain yourself first. It is not psychotherapy, not coaching, and not spiritual direction — I say what it is instead, and what those differences amount to, below.
The private practice is a few hours a week of the same work, for people who are not in a hospital bed.
What Spiritual Care Is
Chaplaincy is a clinical profession. Board certification requires a graduate theological degree, supervised clinical training in hospitals, and a competency review by a professional body. A chaplain is not there to convert anyone, to supply a religious interpretation of events, or to represent a tradition. In the hospital I serve Catholics, evangelicals, Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, atheists, and the many people who have never needed to decide what they believe until now.
What Spiritual Care Is For
Serious illness
Living with a diagnosis, a long treatment, or a prognosis that has changed what you expected. Deciding what matters now, and what you want the remaining time to hold.
Grief and bereavement
Recent loss, anticipated loss, and grief that has gone on long enough that you have stopped mentioning it. Also the losses that are not deaths.
Dying and end of life
For the person who is dying and for the people around them. Legacy, unfinished conversations, ritual, and what to do with the time.
Meaning outside religion
For people who are secular, unaffiliated, deconstructing, or simply done with the vocabulary they were raised in, and who still want to take these questions seriously.
What Spiritual Care Is Not
Not psychotherapy
A therapist is a licensed clinician who assesses and treats mental health conditions. If you are depressed, anxious in a way that interferes with your life, or carrying untreated trauma, that is the right care and this is not a substitute for it. I do not diagnose or treat mental illness, and this is not covered by insurance. Many people do both, and the two do not compete.
Not coaching
Coaching is oriented toward goals and forward motion. Much of what I work with does not move forward: a terminal diagnosis, a death that has already happened, a condition that will not improve. The question is not how to get somewhere but how to live inside what is actually the case.
Not spiritual direction
Spiritual direction usually sits inside a religious tradition and attends to a person's practice or their relationship with God. If that is what you want, I can refer you to people who do it well. My training is clinical rather than devotional, and I do not assume you have a tradition or want one.
What Happens
We talk, for fifty minutes. There is no intake battery, no treatment plan, and no homework unless you want some. I will ask what has been happening and what it has been like, and I will listen for a long time before I say much. Where it goes depends on you: thinking out loud with someone who will not flinch, preparing for a conversation you have been avoiding, planning a ritual, writing something for a person who is dying, working out what you believe now that the old answer has stopped working.
In all my encounters, I work toward a felt sense of possibility amid conditions given and made.
I do not think spiritual care fixes anything. Illness remains illness and the dead stay dead. What it can do is make the situation less solitary, make it possible to say the true thing out loud, and sometimes make visible a possibility that was not visible before. That is a real but modest claim, and I would rather state it accurately than oversell it.
Ethics
Private spiritual care is unlicensed, which means most practitioners answer to no one. I practice under the Association of Professional Chaplains Code of Ethics, which governs confidentiality, scope of practice, and the boundary against proselytizing, and which carries a complaints process attached to my certification. What you tell me stays between us, with the ordinary legal exceptions. I will not promote my own convictions or treat your beliefs as a problem to be corrected. I will say plainly when you need a clinician rather than a chaplain.
I do not work privately with people I have met through the hospital, or with their families. Keeping the two separate is what makes each of them possible.
If you are in danger of hurting yourself, please contact 988 or emergency services rather than waiting for a reply from me.
You are welcome to write to me.