As a therapist, I am interested in working with you to look at why you’re seeking therapy, what your goals for treatment are, and placing them in the wider context of your life and the world(s) you live in. We can inquire where you find yourself in your life, your closest relationships, those issues impacting your own emotional growth, what works and what doesn’t.
My style is interactive, respectful, curious. I’ve worked as a therapist for 35 years and have a variety of approaches and perspectives that I utilize in working with with people’s individual personalities, styles and needs. Most of all, my job is to listen as closely as I can to what’s being said and what’s not. The therapeutic relationship that we develop together forms a foundation for trust, safety and exploration; it’s a testing ground for potentials, new behaviors and ways of being in the world.
The clients I meet with are a diverse, creative group of people working with their lives in this very speedy world.
People come to therapy for lots of different reasons, including …
- Feeling stuck. What’s worked in the past no longer does.
- Relationship Problems. We humans are biologically hardwired for connection with each other. That’s where it gets interesting.
- Overlapping psychiatric issues (e.g. PTSD, bipolar, major mood, attention deficit, dissociative disorders).
- Medical problems (e.g., cancer, HIV, chronic pain) and how they co-exist with the rest of our lives and those around us.
- Drug or alcohol mis-use. Drug/alcohol use can be adaptive, pleasurable, enlivening and it’s all around us. Essential question: is it working for you?
- Problematic behaviors and traits that you know — or others have impressed upon you — don’t work well or just get in your way.
We come to therapy with the full complexity with which we live our lives!
All of this requires that we work under a “big tent,” bringing in as much skill, resource and perspective as we can access. With steady attention, inner conflict can relax and meld itself into choice. It’s important (and respectful) that we place all of your concerns into the full context of your history, culture, relationships past and present and overall life experience.