What's My Approach to Therapy?
People arrive at a therapist's office, having tried their best way of getting along in the world, regardless of age, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and so forth. A universal reason for seeking outside help is distress in a primary relationship. Relationship strife causes suffering, confusion, and profound misery. Often, relational troubles have their origin and are embedded in our earliest relationships dating back to childhood. In therapy, I help individuals understand how early relationships with parents, siblings, and significant others impact relationship troubles in the here and now. A solid therapeutic relationship offers an opportunity for exploration and understanding one's own mind at the deepest level. This can facilitate healing, new pathways of relating, greater authenticity, and living a life that's true to oneself. Trusting one's own mind provides a knowing that, despite life's challenges and ambiguity, our center will hold and not break apart, even when life tosses us around.
Processing loss and making room for grieving is essential for well-being and emotional health, now and later. There are clinicians who offer rapid new age symptom relief interventions that promise to heal trauma in several sessions. Such a cure does not exist. Many of the individuals making these claims also pretend to be experts in neuroscience. All of us are touched by grief, loss, transition, and trauma. This is the very nature of life. Rather than perceiving grief as an adversary to be quickly dismantled and discarded, it may be far more productive to reappraise the value of grief as humanizing, a potential road to self-discovery, increased resilience, and other life-affirming qualities..
My Practice & Services
From the mid-eighties through the mid-nineties, I worked as a primary adolescent and family psychotherapist on a Stanford University inpatient child psychiatry unit in San Jose, California. Adolescents and families presented with depression, anxiety conditions, trauma, divorce, parent-child conflicts, attachment issues, sexual orientation and identity challenges, to name a few. Areas of intense treatment focus in my work with adolescents and families center around helping parents understand what healthy self-esteem is, and ways to grow it in their children. Adolescents who are grounded and feel good about themselves are able to make healthy decisions about relationships, limit setting, and boundaries. In treatment, I help parents facilitate their child's short- and long-term goals. Current research shows that adolescents are the most stressed out population in the country. No wonder, with all the pressure to compete in every arena: social, academic, athletic, and material—also known as the "pseudo" riches. Children and adolescents have a very narrow window, if they have one at all, to dream, to play with ideas, and to "just be" versus perform and achieve.
Average cost per session: $100 plus. Cash, check, and credit card accepted. Sliding scale offered based on need. Out-of-network insurance available.
Specific Issue(s) I'm Skilled at Helping With
Group starting September 2016- Becoming and practicing gratefulness; how the new science of gratitude can make you happier! This group will focus on ways to cultivate and sustain a path forn practicing gratefulness in a warm and harmonious milieu.The practice of gratitude is simple, yet transformational. Becoming grateful in the day to day shofts our focus from what life lacks to a more present state of experiencing abundance. We begin by identifying what makes us grateful and how to tap into feeling grateful in the face of adversity and life's uncertainty. Science supports that consistent gratitude practice changes our brains, improves immunity, makes us healthier and more resilient. It increases our sense of well being and makes it far more possible to manage and embrace the value of our day to day struggles, whatever they are...
How Psychotherapy Can Help
This particular group locates our attention on ways to experience and sustain a state of gratefulness; fullabundance vs emptiness, vibrance vs deadness, the sense of having the riches vs the feeling of deprivation. We begin by identifying what makesn us feel grateful- group members will explore and share activitiesstategies that promote and enhance one's experience of gratitude. Breathing exercises and mindfulness will be layered into the group experience. A gratitude practice lowers blood pressure, stimulates increased resilience, empathy and well being.
