Psychotherapy is about collaboration and connection.
The process of looking for a therapist can be confusing and intimidating—even frightening. At a moment of great vulnerability you are reaching out to a stranger for help, someone to whom you are expected to reveal your most difficult thoughts and emotions. How do you know if you are choosing the right person? And what kind of therapist should you look for anyway? The field is a tangle of acronyms: CBT, DBT, ACT, IFS, and on and on.
Although I draw from a variety of clinical theories and practices, my own approach is fundamentally psychodynamic. This means that I proceed from the idea that the aim of therapy is, to quote the psychotherapist Nancy McWilliams, to cultivate “an increased capacity to acknowledge what is not conscious—that is, to admit what is difficult or painful to see in ourselves.” We want to live truthful and meaningful lives, but our habits of thought, behavior, and emotion get in the way. We think, act, and feel in ways that cause us pain and confusion, and that impede our aspirations for ourselves. The heart of psychodynamic therapy is to better understand our impulses, and by understanding to change them.
Therapy as I understand it is a collaborative and intimate process. It is collaborative in that you are the expert on your own life, and it is vital that we work together to formulate goals, assess progress, and find the right path forward for you—a path that helps you to feel freer, more confident, and more able to face life’s challenges. It is intimate in that the work naturally takes place at the level of a relationship between two people. It is my job to foster that relationship with empathy and sincerity, so that you are able to come to therapy feeling truly, wholly, and complexly yourself.
The process usually starts with a phone call—a 15-minute conversation, free-of-charge, so that I can get an idea of the kind of help you are looking for, and you can get a sense of whether I might be a good fit. After that, I generally spend several sessions listening carefully, gathering more information about what brings you to therapy, including a sense of your childhood, background, beliefs, family life, aspirations, and important relationships. Together we will develop a clearer idea of what the problem is, what is causing it, and how to move forward.
Sessions usually take place once a week for forty-five to fifty minutes.