My Approach to Helping
I believe that great therapy involves using many lenses or frameworks in order to heal. My frameworks are:
1) Concrete behavioral changes. This includes things like exercise, yoga, getting adequate sun, sleep changes, and learning communication skills;
2) Understanding your family "scripts." We all have scripts or stories we tell ourselves. For example, you might have learned from your family that other people will always be disappointing in the end. Or, you might be overly trusting. In order to create new scripts, we must first identify and understand the old ones.
3) Using the therapy relationship as a model. For example, if you want to work on being more authentic, I'm going to ask you to practice that in our therapy relationship. Often times the therapy relationship can mimic parts of other relationships, and we can explore and process our relationship in a new way.
4) Addressing stumbling blocks. We all resist change. But, we can address whatever is stopping you.
More Info About My Practice
Therapy can be life-changing, healing, and transformative. Therapy is also hard. It takes real courage to open up about deep, long-felt struggles. I believe that life is full of complexity, ups, and downs. I am both endlessly optimistic and hopeful about the future and can also feel pessimistic and aware of the many tragedies in life. This informs how I approach therapy because with all of my clients, I seek to provide a sense of grounded hope. To me, grounded hope is about feeling hopeful amidst creating space to acknowledge all of the difficulties and challenges of life.
What I Love about Being a Psychotherapist
I genuinely love being a psychotherapist. In addition to helping my clients, my clients make me a better person; I take the stance that I learn from everyone in my life. I think it takes tremendous courage to examine one's life, so I constantly feel inspired by the people I work with. For me, it is a true joy to see my clients make changes that contribute to feeling more actualized. I also find it to be incredibly meaningful to help people face emotions, experiences, and memories that were too overwhelming or painful before and that now we get to face together in therapy.
