Full Story
"I think about memory, story, and what it means to stay fully yourself as life changes.
I always have."
Where it begins
The photograph that explains the work.
You can read the degrees and credentials below. But the truth is that this photograph of my grandmother's old refrigerator probably tells you more about my work than any of them.
I stood in that kitchen doorway so often that the sound of the seal releasing, the cool air escaping, and the small rituals that followed became part of my internal landscape. The glass of milk poured the same way every time. The sandwich made without asking what I wanted, because she already knew.
Those moments taught me how memory lives in objects and gestures, how meaning settles into the body, and how simple acts of care become emotional anchors that a person carries for the rest of their life.
That fridge showed me what it feels like to be known and tended to.
It also showed me what is lost when nobody thinks to ask.
The Work
A Lifetime.
One belief.
I've spent my career working with people navigating the transitions that don't come with instructions: caregiving, memory change, legacy, grief, and the quieter questions of what we want to leave behind and how we want to be remembered while we are still here.
My work begins from a belief that has never changed:
Every person wants to be seen, heard, and valued as who they are. That doesn't stop being true when memory shifts, or roles change, or life becomes harder to navigate. And the conditions for it can be built deliberately: the right environment, the right language, the right relational structure. That is not wishful thinking. It is designable.
What I've built over my career is a way of working that takes the full person seriously. Not just their needs, but their humor, their aesthetics, their language, their pleasures, and the stories they most want held.
I work with individuals and families navigating memory change, identity transition, legacy, and the work of staying present to one another through difficulty. I also work with organizations: cultural institutions, healthcare environments, care facilities, helping them build conditions where people remain visible, valued, and recognized.
I speak and teach internationally: to clinical teams, cultural institutions, and professional communities where this work is needed most.
Credentials
The degrees that made the work possible.
Three degrees. Not a straight line. Each one adding a layer the others needed.
PhD
Media Psychology
Master of Human Services
Social Gerontology
MA
Psychology
Certifications
The gerontology came first, because of my grandmother, and because aging is one of the most underthought territories in design and care. I wanted to understand what it actually costs people when the systems around them stop seeing them clearly.
The psychology came next: how people make meaning, how media shapes the stories we tell about ourselves and each other, and how identity holds or shifts across a life. The marriage and family therapy certification is where the relational work lives: the families in the room together, the dynamics that shape how a person's story gets held or lost, the conversations that need someone skilled to help them happen at all.
The design certification came later, and it named something I had already been doing for years: building experiences and environments that help people stay more fully themselves.
Together they describe someone who approaches aging not as a medical problem or a social challenge but as a design problem, one that when taken seriously helps people remain seen, heard, and valued as who they are.
The Practice
SenStoria.
Worth Considering.
The work, today.
I founded SenStoria to do this work in the world, with families, care organizations, cultural institutions, and the people moving through all of them.
I write about what I notice in Worth Considering on Substack: culture, aging, and the small moments that turn out to mean something.
Publications
Writing that holds the work.
The Damage of "Difficult"
TEDxCheyenne
What happens when young people are consistently labeled difficult? This talk examines how the words we use about people shape their sense of who they are, and argues that people are never the problem. Problems are problems. People are people.
Watch the talk →Eudamonic Wellness of True Crime Hosts
Chapter in Rethinking True Crime: Recent Shifts in True Crime Content and Scholarship · McFarland
A co-authored examination of what sustained engagement with true crime content does to the hosts who produce it, and what it reveals about parasocial connection and identity.
The Power of Parasocial Relationships: Navigating the Intersection of Fandoms and Black Men's Mental Health through HBO's Insecure
Chapter in Fandom in Marginalized Communities · Co-authored with Tieranni Parquet
An exploration of how parasocial relationships with fictional characters support identity, belonging, and mental health in communities that have historically been underrepresented in media.
View book →Exploring the Role of Need for Cognition on Podcast Companion Engagement
Doctoral Dissertation · Fielding Graduate University · Media Psychology
An investigation into how cognitive engagement shapes the parasocial bonds audiences form with podcast hosts, and what that reveals about identity, narrative, and media connection across the lifespan.
Read the dissertation →Mommyhood Diaries: Living the Chaos One Day at a Time
Sole author · Award winner, Independent Book Publishers Association
Part journal, part datebook, a companion for parents navigating the early years. An early expression of the belief that the small moments of ordinary life are worth attending to.
Karmic Acts of Kindness
Sole author
A collection exploring small gestures and their ripple effects, an early iteration of the attention to ordinary moments that runs through all the work.
A Closing Thought
"My grandmother never used words like legacy or meaning-making. She just opened the refrigerator and poured the milk."
But what she gave me, the experience of being known, tended to, and held in someone's ordinary attention, is exactly what I have spent my career trying to help other people give each other.
That is the work. It is worth doing carefully.
Working with me looks different depending on what you need, whether that's individual and family sessions, organizational consulting, speaking and training, or Remembering Together, a structured practice for families who want to hold someone's story before it slips away.
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