My Approach to Helping
Have you found yourself exhausted by the cycles that seem to repeat over and over in your life, despite your best efforts to create change?
Have you worked hard to find success in a career you feel passionate about, only to find yourself burned out and resentful?
Do you wind up in relationships where your needs aren’t met? Where you feel stifled and invisible?
Do you feel unfulfilled, even when things are going well?
Perhaps you tend to shoot yourself down just when things are going well for you.
If any of this sounds familiar, you’re in the right place.
These patterns we feel trapped in point to a need to understand ourselves in a deep way, exploring what these cycles mean to us and how they’ve served us in our lives, in good ways, and in not-so-good ways.
Maybe you've been to therapy before and had disappointing experiences. My approach to therapy focuses on relationships as agents of healing, rather than on techniques. I don’t give “homework” or fixate on your symptoms or diagnosis; instead, I listen intently to your story, to what feels most painful and urgent to you, and we work on building up those areas of emptiness or woundedness. That’s not to say that symptoms don’t improve with this kind of treatment: on the contrary, my patients have successfully recovered from suicidal thoughts, cutting, obsessive-compulsive rituals, out-of-control behaviors, trauma, trust issues, fears of intimacy, chronic depression, panic attacks, and feeling “stuck” or stalled in their lives.
By focusing our attention on what your symptoms may be stemming from, rather than exclusively on the symptoms themselves, we can figure out what things mean. If you went to a doctor with a fever, and you were diagnosed with “diffuse high body temperature syndrome” and told to take Tylenol, you probably wouldn’t feel you’d gotten very good care, even if the Tylenol did make your fever go away for a while, and the “diagnosis” was technically accurate. But if a doctor isn’t curious about what your fever means—what’s causing your body temperature to rise—they’re not a very effective doctor. Non-judgmental curiosity is our best tool for exploring ourselves, and it’s a tool I can help you develop. Rather than trying to get rid of parts of you that have been labeled “wrong” or “bad,” we’ll work to understand those parts of you as we strengthen the parts of you that have helped you survive and overcome.
