I’m focused on the part that hasn't healed yet.
I work primarily with individuals, couples, and people who feel stuck, caught in repeating emotional or relational patterns, who understand that something needs to change, but may not yet know how to reach it.
My work tends to go beneath the presenting problem—toward the wounds, beliefs, protective patterns, relationships, and experiences that continue to shape what happens in the present.
Marc is supervised by Daniel Brake, LMFT-S
focus
Complex Trauma • Grief • Relational Patterns • Existential Work
DEPTH WORK
Hypnotherapy • Parts Work • Ketamine-Assisted Therapy • Somatic Work
CLIENTS
Individuals • Couples • Adults • LGBTQIA+ • ENM / Poly • Autism/ADHD
Before I challenge a pattern, I want to understand why it makes sense.
People rarely become who they are for no reason.
I want to understand your model of the world from the inside: what you believe, what you value, what you fear, what you learned about yourself and other people, and what happened that made your current way of navigating life make sense.
That includes the parts of you that may now be creating problems. Defensiveness, control, withdrawal, anger, people-pleasing, perfectionism, avoidance, even behaviors you deeply dislike in yourself often began as attempts to protect something.
Understanding that does not mean we leave the pattern alone. It means we know what we are actually asking you to change.
I can see why you became this way. Now let’s look at what it’s costing you.
I also pay close attention to the beliefs and conditioning we inherit from family, culture, religion, relationships, and the environments that shaped us. Most of us absorb those ideas long before we are old enough to decide whether we agree with them.
Sometimes a belief is simply no longer true. Sometimes it is perfectly defensible—and still getting in the way of the life or relationship you want.
Therapy, to me, is not about replacing your worldview with mine. It is about helping you see your own system clearly enough to decide what still belongs to you.
The pattern may have protected you. It doesn’t have to define you.
The common thread in my work is what I call core authenticity.
The Geronimo Method is the framework I’ve developed over years of trauma work, hypnotherapy, relationship therapy, parts work, and experiential approaches. Rather than beginning with the assumption that something about you is defective, I’m interested in understanding what your mind and nervous system learned to do—and why.
We look for the wounds, emotional reactions, protective strategies, inherited beliefs, and unconscious conclusions that continue to shape your life in the present.
Sometimes the problem you can see is only the surface expression of something much older underneath it.
02 — Separate protection from identity
A strategy you developed to survive, belong, stay safe, or earn love can eventually feel like personality. Part of the work is discovering what is truly you and what you learned to become.
As old wounds and conditioning lose their grip, there is often less need to perform, defend, please, control, or hide—and more freedom to choose how you actually want to live and relate.
The problem you can name is enough to begin. We can follow it from there.
01
Old wounds, attachment injuries, emotional, physical or sexual trauma, and reactions that still feel organized around what happened before.
02
Chronic conflict, disconnection, betrayal, infidelity, trust, attachment patterns, and relationships that keep finding their way back to the same painful place.
03
Sexual trauma, erectile dysfunction, desire discrepancy, shame, incompatibility, intimacy concerns, and difficulty feeling connected sexually.
04
When you understand what is happening intellectually, but anxiety, depression, overwhelm, avoidance, or recurring emotional reactions still keep taking over.
05
Autism, ADHD, masking, self-understanding, identity conflicts, and sorting out who you are underneath family, cultural, relational, or societal expectations.
06
Grief, Meaning & Spiritual Experience
Death and loss, major life transitions, existential crises, spiritual awakening, and experiences that challenge your previous understanding of yourself or the world.
Warmth provides the foundation for honesty
I want therapy to feel like a place where you do not have to perform, manage me, or pretend something is working when it isn’t.
I can be very direct when I think a pattern is getting in your way. But confrontation only helps when you first feel understood. I’m much less interested in being right than in finding the intervention that gives you more freedom.
Sometimes that means compassion. Sometimes humor. Sometimes sitting quietly. And occasionally it means saying the thing neither of us can afford to keep walking around.
Safe Enough to Stop Performing
You do not need to impress me, protect me from your reactions, or arrive with the “right” version of yourself. We can work with what is actually there.
Direct When it Serves You
I will not avoid something important simply because it is uncomfortable. But challenge should create movement—not shame.
Tailored to the Person in Front of Me
Some people need structure. Some need depth. Some need room. Some need me to interrupt the pattern in real time. The work changes with you.
We Can Take Care of What Arises
You do not have to know exactly where therapy is going before we begin. If something unexpected opens—a memory, a part, grief, anger, a relationship problem—we can follow it without losing the larger case.
I’m not married to a method. I wait for the right opening.
I pay attention to where the work begins to move. Then I choose the right tool.
01 — Psychotherapy
Conversation, reflection, attachment work, insight, and practical change in ordinary consciousness.
02 — Relationship & Attachment Work
Understanding the patterns that shape closeness, conflict, trust, intimacy, and how you respond to the people who matter most.
03 — Hypnotherapy
A more focused way of accessing emotional material, imagery, memory, beliefs, and parts that may be difficult to reach through conversation alone.
04 — Inner Child & Parts Work
Working with the different protective, wounded, critical, fearful, or younger parts that can pull you in competing directions.
05 — Trauma Reprocessing
Experiential and bilateral approaches that can help old experiences become less active in the present.
06 — Ketamine-Assisted Therapy
When appropriate, altered-state work can create a different relationship to thoughts, emotions, memories, and protective patterns.
Your life doesn't have to be conventional to do this work.
All of you is welcome here—including the parts you may still be learning how to welcome yourself.
I enjoy working with people whose relationships, identities, sexuality, or beliefs do not fit neatly into somebody else’s template.
That includes LGBTQIA+ clients, neurodivergent people, polyamorous and ethically non-monogamous relationships, throuples and other relationship structures, as well as people navigating kink, sexuality, gender, religion, culture, spirituality, or identity in ways that may have been difficult to talk about elsewhere.
Some parts of ourselves are easy to bring into the room. Others have spent years being hidden, masked, managed, or accompanied by shame. You do not have to decide which parts of you are acceptable before you get here.
You should not have to spend therapy defending your relationship, explaining your identity, or educating your therapist before you can get to the reason you came in.
You do not have to edit yourself to belong in this room.
At the same time, being nonjudgmental does not mean being passive. Every relationship structure can contain attachment wounds, avoidance, jealousy, betrayal, control, poor boundaries, mismatched needs, or behavior that hurts someone.
I’m interested in understanding the agreements and values that belong to your relationship—and then helping you see clearly where the way you are living supports them and where it does not.
The work is intuitive. The training underneath it isn’t.
My work has developed across psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, trauma treatment, relationships, sexuality, and altered states of consciousness. I’m interested in both the art of recognizing the right moment and the discipline of understanding why an intervention works.
01 — Education & Clinical Practice
- Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist Associate
- Supervised by Daniel Brake, LMFT-S
- Master’s in Counseling / Marriage & Family Therapy, Daybreak University
- BA in Psychology
- 15+ years of hypnotherapy practice
02 — Advanced Clinical Training
- Imago Relationship Therapy
- Advanced Human Sexuality & Sex Therapy
- Master Practitioner of Gestalt-Based Hypnotherapy
- Certified Master Practitioner of Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP)
- Experiential & Emotional Reprocessing
- Trauma / bilateral approaches
03 — Doctoral Work & Research
I am currently pursuing a PhD in Psychology at the California Institute for Human Science, specializing in Psychedelics, Consciousness & Transformation. My doctoral research is focused on studying the Geronimo Method alongside ketamine-assisted psychotherapy, with particular interest in trauma-related symptoms, anxiety, and psychological transformation.
My doctoral research is supervised by Glenn Hartelius, PhD, Co-Director of Psychology Programs at CIHS and co-editor of The Ketamine Papers: Science, Therapy, and Transformation.
MBA, San Diego State University • Former United States Marine
THE RIGHT FIT MATTERS
Sometimes the right therapist isn’t me. Our goal is to help you find the clinician and kind of work that make the most sense for what you need.
If Sara or another therapist would be a stronger fit, we can help you figure that out during your consultation.
Sara Sloan
LMFT, CST, IRT
AASECT Certified Sex Therapist •Neurodivergence • Couples • Narcissistic Abuse • Sexual Trauma • Identity
common questions
A brief Zoom/phone conversation to understand what brings you in, what you’ve already tried, and whether Marc—or someone else at ACT—seems like the right fit.
No. Start with what you want to change. Marc can help determine whether ordinary psychotherapy, trauma work, hypnotherapy, parts work, ketamine-assisted therapy, or another approach makes sense.
Not automatically. Those are available depths, not default protocols. The work begins with understanding the case and uses additional modalities when there is a reason to.
Yes. Marc works with individuals and couples, including relationship distress, attachment patterns, betrayal, intimacy concerns, and unconventional relationship structures.
Yes—you don’t need to edit your identity, neurotype, sexuality, spirituality, or relationship structure to begin the work.
Many of Marc’s clients already have substantial insight into themselves. The work often focuses on what remains active even after the problem is well understood intellectually.