I’m Thomas, and this is my story

I didn't come to this work through a straight line. I came to it the way most meaningful things happen - through lived experience, a few hard years, and the kind of loss that makes you stop and ask what really matters.

 I grew up in the United States, where I earned my bachelor's and master's degrees in music, and started building my career as an opera singer. I sang leading roles at my universities, won some important competitions, and was a member of some wonderful young artist programs (the Merola Program, and the Wolf Trap Opera Studio). I even sang a solo recital at Carnegie Hall.

 In 2011, I moved to Germany to join the opera studio at the Hamburg State Opera, and after that built a freelance career that eventually led to two years as a soloist in the ensemble at Theater Magdeburg.

 From the outside, things looked good! And in many ways, they were. But through all my studies, the competitions, the performances, I was carrying something with me: an anxiety that I couldn’t shake, and an inner critic that never really let go. I found ways to succeed despite them, but I never found a way to quiet them. I spent enormous amounts of energy trying to push them away. It never worked. And the longer that went on, the more it started to affect my singing, and my confidence on stage - which only made the anxiety worse, and my inner critic louder. It was a vicious cycle, and I didn’t know how to stop it.

Here’s how it all started

In 2016, three major things happened at once. First, my contract in Magdeburg ended; then, I moved to a brand new city (Berlin); then, my younger brother died.

Grief has a way of stripping things down to what's essential. Suddenly I was living far from my family, in a country that still didn’t feel like it was mine and a city I barely knew, at a moment when my career and my private life were both massive question marks. I had been in Germany long enough to really feel the distance between me and the people I'd known my whole life, but hadn't yet found my solid community in my new country. And I could count on one hand the number of people I knew in Berlin. I felt genuinely lost.

I reached out to therapists in Berlin, and through an incredible stroke of luck, found a therapist who worked with IFS. I’d never heard of it before, but I decided to give it a try.

That’s when something shifted.

For the first time, instead of trying to push away the parts of me that I didn’t like - the anxious parts, the critical parts, the people pleasing parts - I started to actually listen to them. To get curious about them. To try understand what they were carrying, and most importantly, why they were doing the things they’d been doing. I’d hated my anxiety and my inner critic for years, but through IFS I was able to befriend them and hear the reasons they were stuck in those roles. I was able to help the younger, vulnerable parts of me they’d been looking after for so long - and in doing so, free up my anxiety and my critic to help me in other ways.

Now, my anxiety is an incredibly helpful inner planner, and my critic is my biggest cheerleader.

That process changed everything. Not just my anxiety and my critic, but my relationship with my whole self, with my family, with my work, and with what I wanted my life to look like.

The turning point

What I found through IFS was something I hadn't found in all my years of trying to manage things through willpower and discipline: genuine relief. And once I found it, I knew I wanted to bring it to other people - especially artists, who consistently put their most vulnerable parts on display for the world, and other immigrants and expats like me, who know what it means to leave their world behind to build a life far from home.

In 2021 I earned my license in Berlin as a Heilpraktiker für Psychotherapie, trained to become a Certified Internal Family Systems Therapist, and I've been doing this work  ever since - and what I bring to every session is not just clinical training, but the lived experience of someone who has sat exactly where many of my clients are sitting.

And I’m still performing! That picture up top shows me taking a bow after singing an after-hours concert at the Louvre in 2024. My singing career has taken me to some amazing places - you can read more about my singing work here - and I know I wouldn't be where I am now if I hadn't discovered IFS. Because discovering IFS helped me discover my true self.

And that’s exactly why I do this work. I've seen what changes when you finally stop fighting your inner world and start listening to it.

How things look now

Want to try it for yourself?

If any of what you've read here resonates, I'd love to connect. A free 15-minute intro call is a relaxed, no-commitment way to see if working together feels right.

You can schedule a call by filling out this form, or emailing me directly at: thomas@englishtherapyinberlin.com

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