a wound, a crossing, a becoming
About Daniel
Dad. Wounded Healer. Entrepreneur.Finding solid grounding, not juggling plates.
My Story
My parents came to America on a riverboat. They fled Vietnam carrying only what survival demands — resilience, love, and a willingness to begin again. I was born into the aftermath of that crossing, into a culture that had no map for what I carried inside my body.
I was born into the aftermath of that crossing — into America, into capitalism, into a culture that had no map for what I carried.
I spent my early adulthood achieving. High grades. Exceeding expectations. Being praised for my superpowers. What no one asked — what the capitalist system was never designed to ask — was whether any of it was making me well. The cape got heavier. And I kept pushing, because that is what you do when the biological imperative says: survive.
The healing work I do now came through my own slow unraveling. Not a dramatic collapse — a quiet one. A gradual loosening of everything I had performed my way through. I do not try to resolve the duality anymore. I try to inhabit it fully. That is the work I invite others into.
How I Work
I work one-on-one, online, in a space built for slow, honest conversation. Not a framework. Not a formula. The medicine, as I have come to understand it, is simply to be present — without ego, without the consultant fixing, without judgment.
The medicine, as I have come to understand it, is simply to be present — without ego, without the consultant fixing, without judgment.
I am not a therapist. I am a wounded healer — someone who has done, and continues to do, this work in their own life. What I offer is a relationship, built session by session, in service of your becoming.
How I Show Up
Honesty
I say what I see. I bring my full presence, not a performance of care.
Slowness
We live in a culture of speed. This work asks us to slow down enough to actually feel.
Duality
I hold space for contradiction. You do not have to choose between the parts of yourself.
Embodiment
The body knows things the mind hasn't caught up to yet. The cape lives there too. We listen to both.
The Crossing
My parents crossed the ocean with nothing but each other and the will to begin again.
My lineage is a line of people torn by war, colonization, and the slow erasure of a culture. My parents were Vietnamese Boat People — they left everything, crossed water, and arrived into a country that had no map for what they carried. I was born into the aftermath of that crossing.
Within my body lives the inheritance of that survival. Not just their resilience, but their unspoken grief. The annihilation energy. The forward motion that never quite stopped because stopping, for them, meant dying. I inherited the strategy.
For years, I confused their survival with my own ambition. I wore the cape they handed me — not out of cruelty, but out of love, out of the only world they knew. It paid me in money, title, and praise. And still the words broke free: I can't breathe.
This is not a story about blame. It is a story about inheritance — and about the slow, necessary work of learning which parts of what we carry are ours to keep, and which belong to the sea.
The work I do now is inseparable from the crossing they made.
Experience & Training
My work is grounded in lived experience and formal study — not in a credential alone, but in the ongoing practice of doing this work myself. The credential is the least interesting part.
The credential is the least interesting part. The lived experience is where this work is rooted.
Coaching Certification
Trained in co-active coaching methodology, with an emphasis on somatic awareness, presence, and holding space for complexity.
Depth Psychology
Ongoing study in Jungian psychology, shadow work, IFS parts work, and the archetypal dimensions of identity and belonging.
Somatic Practice
Years of personal somatic inquiry — learning to feel the cape in the body, not just name it in the mind.
Cultural & Intergenerational Healing
Deep personal and academic engagement with intergenerational trauma, diaspora identity, and the psychology of the immigrant experience. This is not academic for me.
Years of 1:1 Work
Hundreds of hours working alongside people navigating identity, transition, grief, and the in-between spaces of becoming.
I am not a licensed therapist. I am a wounded healer — someone who has done, and continues to do, this work in their own life.
My Healing Journey
I've gotten a second opinion, and a third, and drew replacement tarot cards, and all paths led to the same place: becoming a wounded healer. This is not a polished story. It is an ongoing one.
For a long time, I believed that healing meant arriving somewhere. That if I did enough inner work, read enough books, sat with enough teachers, I would eventually reach solid ground. What I found instead was that the need for solid ground was itself the wound — the grasping after it, the quiet terror of not having it.
My parents survived by not stopping. I inherited that strategy — forward motion as survival. For decades, I confused movement with progress and busyness with meaning. In my IFS parts work, I found parts that had been doing the work of survival since childhood — adaptive strategies, grown into armor. The cape got heavier. And still I pushed.
I did not heal by fixing myself. I healed by learning to inhabit what I had spent years trying to escape.
The turning point was not dramatic. It was quiet. A slow unraveling of everything I had performed my way through. I had to sit with the grief of a childhood spent between two worlds — the Vietnamese home that felt foreign, the American world that never quite made room. I had to feel, in my body, the words: I can't breathe.
Grief ripens us, pulls up from the depths of our souls what is most authentic in our beings.
What emerged from that sitting was not resolution. It was capacity. The capacity to be with both — the storm and the calm, the grief and the gratitude, the wound and the gift — without needing them to become something other than what they are. That is still the work. It may always be.
I share this not to make my story the center of the work, but because I believe you deserve to know the ground your guide is standing on. I am not standing above the duality. I am living inside it — the same as you.