My Approach to Helping
The quality of our relationships determines the quality of our lives. Relationships are where we experience our deepest wounds and our deepest healing. This is the paradox and the promise. Therapy is a sanctuary of healing, learning, and growth, in which we soften the paradox, and open to the promise.
By giving your relational wounds the thoughtful care that they've wanted, needed, and deserved all along, your innate healing instincts can be restored. Your original knowing that you deserve safety, fairness, and love in all of your relationships, including with yourself, can be fully reawakened.
Because relational trauma and neglect are the biggest obstacles to flourishing, I offer in-depth attention to trauma and neglect prevention, recovery, and post-traumatic growth. Post-traumatic growth is poetic justice. It emerges from wrestling with very stressful life circumstances, finding one's way out of the depths, and discovering that through your trials you have gained a greater appreciation for life, deepened capacity to relate authentically, increased inner strength, openness to new possibilities, and spiritual or philosophical transformation.
But what happens when we suffer in silence? The healing process stops. The realm that we're most likely to suffer in silence in is eros. Our families, religions, and cultures rarely offer a safe, protected, and educated space to explore and discover who we really are in the realm of love and sexuality. Cultural denial and repression, and centuries of guilt and shame, have made difficulty nearly universal. Yet, it's our birthright to discover who we are, and who we are becoming, in the realm of eros.
Eros is the energy of love, sexuality, spirit, and the creative pulse of life. It brings us into intimate contact with the numinous, and reveals that flesh, emotions, and spirit are indivisible. By melting the taboos on open, vulnerable, and honest conversations on this rich and complex territory, we can activate the transformational process. By layering your learning, one awareness and skill at a time, you can move from being overwhelmed by the power, risk, and mystery of eros, to learning how to play and co-create in this life-giving realm.
Over time, as you heal your hidden wounds, you'll discover your deepest gifts. You'll come to know that the parts of yourself that you thought were the least loveable and desirable become your greatest sources of sensitivity, authenticity, compassion, resilience, and creative aliveness. Healing eros, whether you are single or partnered, is a journey home to your soul.