I grew up in a small town in southern Colorado. By the time I graduated high school, the opioid crisis had arrived, and I found myself inside it. For years, my world contracted to a single biological imperative — managing withdrawal. Relationships ended. Motivation disappeared. My body became something I endured rather than inhabited.

At the time, I didn’t have language for what was happening. I didn’t know about the neurobiology of opioid dependence, or that my nervous system had reorganized itself around a prediction that withdrawal was always imminent. I just knew I was stuck, and that the person I’d been was disappearing.

In the winter of 2012, I asked for help. I’ve been in recovery ever since.

What happened next surprised me. I didn’t just want to get better — I wanted to understand what had happened inside my body. That question pulled me into the mental health field, first as a substance abuse counselor at Soba Recovery Center in Malibu, then as a resident advisor and counselor at The Pointe Malibu, where I spent four years working with people living with co-occurring mental health disorders, substance use disorders, and chronic pain. I watched people struggle with the same disconnect I’d experienced: their bodies were telling them something important, and nobody was teaching them how to listen.

I pursued an Alcohol and Drug Abuse Counselor certification at Loyola Marymount University. I helped develop a pain recovery program that used biopsychosocial approaches to chronic pain — and saw firsthand how people’s relationships with their bodies could fundamentally shift when they understood the neuroscience underneath their experience.

That’s what led me to Pepperdine. I earned my Master’s degree in Clinical Psychology from the Graduate School of Education and Psychology in 2025. During my training, I served as Program Manager at Lightfully Behavioral Health, running the operational and clinical functions of a six-bed primary mental health facility in Brentwood. I completed my MFT traineeship at OPICA, providing counseling to individuals with dementia and neurocognitive disorders across the full spectrum of care. I now work as a Primary Therapist at Purposes Recovery, providing individual, couples, family, and group psychotherapy in a residential treatment setting.

But here’s what I kept noticing across every setting, every population, every modality: the people who got better were the ones who learned to read their own bodies. Not in a mystical sense — in a neurobiological sense. The ones who could say “my chest is tightening and that’s my nervous system predicting threat” rather than “I’m broken and anxious again.”

The problem was access. That kind of somatic awareness typically takes months of skilled therapy to develop. And the people who need it most — people in underserved communities, people who can’t afford $200/hour, people whose therapists don’t speak their body’s language — are the ones least likely to get it.

So I taught myself to code.

Cathexis is the tool I wish had existed when I was 19 and my nervous system was running predictions I couldn’t see. It’s grounded in the neuroscience that finally made my own experience make sense: Lisa Feldman Barrett’s constructed emotion theory, Karl Friston’s predictive processing framework, Jaak Panksepp’s primary affect systems, Antonio Damasio’s somatic markers, Karim Nader’s memory reconsolidation research, and Mark Solms’s neuropsychoanalysis. Not polyvagal theory. Not pop psychology. The actual science of how brains construct experience from body data.

I built every line of code, wrote every therapeutic script, designed every intervention graph, and grounded every algorithm in the clinical frameworks I use with my own patients. Because the gap between what neuroscience knows and what people can access shouldn’t be a $200/hour bottleneck. It should be a tool on your phone that teaches you to notice what your body is already doing — and understand what it means.

That’s Cathexis.