Adolescents and school-based work
Experience supporting adolescents, children, and families, including behavioral health needs that show up as attention problems, avoidance, emotional overload, conflict, and follow-through struggles.
Professional profile
A counselor with a wider-than-usual map of people and systems.
I work from a person-centered, evidence-informed base with children, adolescents, adults, and families in community, school-based, and behavioral-health settings. The concerns are rarely tidy: substance use, anxiety, depression, trauma, grief, identity, burnout, spirituality, family strain, and the practical disruption that comes with major transitions.
Before counseling, I spent twenty years as a U.S. Navy officer in leadership, operations, engineering, and international environments. That background does not make command and therapy the same thing. It does mean I have spent much of my adult life paying attention to responsibility, adaptation, development, institutional pressure, and the human cost of complicated systems.
Also true: I’m a father, I pause movies to identify filming locations, and I own a Belarusian sauna hat that does not require explanation but usually gets one anyway.
Clinical work
Clinical experience grounded in real-world complexity.
The through-line is helping people understand what is happening, reduce avoidable harm, and build workable next steps without pretending life is simpler than it is.
Substance use and dual diagnosis
Clinical exposure to substance-use treatment, dual-diagnosis concerns, and residential behavioral health settings as part of a broader counseling background rather than a single-issue specialty.
Military-connected people
Established familiarity with military culture, transitions, leadership systems, and institutional stress, alongside clinical work with Veterans and military-connected people.
Adults, families, and transitions
Support around anxiety, depression, trauma recovery, grief, burnout, identity development, spiritual questioning, relationship strain, and major life changes.
Navy leadership
Twenty years in demanding roles where people, operations, and systems had to work together.
Senior staff coordination, planning, readiness, personnel accountability, and organizational follow-through.
Operational planning and execution across complex environments where timing, communication, and judgment mattered.
Technical and personnel leadership in high-responsibility engineering settings, including wooden-hulled mine countermeasures ships.
Those roles involved more than holding a title. They meant developing people, coordinating across specialties, keeping systems ready, making decisions with incomplete information, and staying accountable when conditions changed.
The breadth of the career matters: staff leadership, operations, engineering, technical systems, mentoring, international assignments, German language training, and cross-cultural work across varied commands and missions. The useful civilian translation is not a slogan about being mission-driven. It is a long record of adapting to unfamiliar, demanding roles while remaining responsible for people and organizational outcomes.
Human-centered technology
Practical tools for attention, regulation, organization, and everyday functioning.
I build and experiment with wellness-adjacent software because clinical work makes everyday friction hard to ignore.
SplitBrain
A binaural-beats and audio-environment app designed to support focus, relaxation, sleep routines, and mood-related self-management.
Forwardish
An in-development task-management and assistance app for adolescents who struggle with cognitive overload, attention, task initiation, organization, and follow-through.
X89 Labs
The place where I collect software experiments involving practical AI, behavioral support, self-management, and tools that make daily life a little less opaque.
Perspective
Credibility without the laminated résumé voice.
“Geoff has a wonderful sense of humor which he weaves into professional communication…he is keenly aware of individual needs of the client and takes a genuine interest in client self-disclosure.”— Darlene Babyak, Ph.D, LPCC-S
“LCDR Belanger is far and away the most dedicated mentor of Junior Officers and Sailors that I have witnessed. He consistently seeks out and tackles the most challenging leadership issues and commits himself wholeheartedly to his mentees.”— Commander Casey Plew, USN