The Way I Work

As a psychotherapist for individuals, couples and groups, I provide a safe space in which my clients can open, explore, and challenge themselves to get in touch with their innate wisdom, aptitudes and well being. My work is grounded in the belief that people have the resources for happiness and ease within themselves. It is my role to understand my client’s unique needs, dispositions and struggles so as to help facilitate attunement to their inner knowing and strength while uncovering what may be concealing these resources. Offering insight, empathy and skills help to move the work toward resolution. I’m active, engaged, caring and focused on expanding your understanding of your emotional and behavioral patterns to make the changes you most need.

Insight, Relational, and Systems Therapies

I primarily work using short- and long-term psychodynamic, internal-family systems methods. I listen with care on multiple levels: emotional, cognitive, verbal and non-verbal, and conscious and unconscious. Akin to walking beside you on a journey of self exploration, I aim to understand your emotional patterns, circumstances and challenges from your perspective. Then, I often provide and elicit questions, reflections and challenges so that you may understand your issues from a broader, more nuanced and holistic perspective. Part of this work is making unconscious processes conscious so their influences can be seen, understood and integrated. From this therapy process clients commonly live with greater authenticity, joy, self-love, ease, and confidence with reduced confusion and suffering. People often learn to embrace their life situations and relationships with clarity, acceptance and strength, while making important decisions with integrity and joy.

Mindfulness

As a mindfulness instructor with over thirty years of my own meditation practice, I offer clients my heart-connected presence as well as several methods of mindfulness to integrate directly into their lives. These methods are especially useful for emotional distress of depression, negative and judgmental thinking patterns, and anxiety. Cultivating mindfulness is learning to be intimate with our here-and-now experiences of bodily sensations, feelings and thinking, whether pleasant or difficult. As our attunement develops, we commonly see how much we are lost in thoughts about our lives and relationships, and missing the experiences themselves. A rich and sometimes challenging closeness to the textures of life develops from our growing mindfulness, awareness and allowing of what is. Clarity, freedom to choose and insight into how we live our lives are other gifts that often arise spontaneously from the practice.

Couples

I help couples clarify, express and understand each partners’ feelings and unmet needs to resolve conflicts and rebuild trust. The work addresses issues of affairs, communication, sexuality, trust, conflict resolution, substance abuse, work and intimacy. Relationships quite often enter phases of conflict and accommodation that seem impassable and disillusioning. On the contrary, these experiences typically mask partners’ deeper needs and fears that when unearthed hold the key to evolve each person and the relationship to new phases of intimacy. This work attends to the unhealthy patterns and blocks to intimacy by safely going to the heart of things; clarifying the hurt, confusion and fear to access the authentic expression and validation that is yearned for. Growing friendship and passion may result as well as clarity of what direction to take the relationship. I use Emotionally Focused, Non-Violent Communication, Attachment based, Gottman influenced, and family-of-origin methods to support the clear expressions of and deeper understandings of how our past experiences impact our relationship patterns.

Focused Therapies

I supplement my work with a number of focused and scientifically backed therapeutic methods when this is collaboratively agreed upon. Such techniques are drawn from cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, biofeedback, focusing, body based therapies and emotionally focused therapy. These methods can work in the background or be the primary focus of therapy for specific problems such as stress, emotional overwhelm, depression, anger, and addiction.

Specific Orientations