Individual Therapy
My style is welcoming, thoughtful and engaging. I am highly sensitive to emotional nuance and what might be going on below the surface. The kind of therapy I provide can best be understood as a special kind of relationship. In this relationship you have the opportunity to experience enough trust to share what could not be shared before, and feel deeply received and profoundly understood in an atmosphere of respect and collaboration. I believe in the healing power of a deep and creative therapeutic relationship. For more information go to For Individuals or For Men.
Couple Therapy
I work with couples to help create more intimacy and to understand the roots of conflict and/or emotional distancing. Frequently the argument isn’t about what it appears to be, and therefore there is no resolution. Once we begin to understand what each spouse is really trying to communicate, the development of new emotional intimacy is set in motion. In addition, I help with issues connected to commitment, and socio-cultural diversity.
I also work with couples who are struggling to put the pieces of their relationship back together after the revelation of infidelity. The discovery of infidelity can be a a traumatic experience and deserves to be met with empathy, understanding and support for healing. You may wish to visit my blog, About Affairs.
It can be anxiety provoking to think about coming in as a couple. For more about this, and how I work with couples click on For Couples and For Men.
Areas Of Focus
Self care is not selfish, but many of us have been brought up to believe otherwise. Self-care is necessary for self-respect and emotional wellbeing.
Codependency refers to a pattern of automatically putting others’ needs before your own, thus enabling others to take advantage of you. This can lead to more and more giving in an attempt to be recognized as valuable by the other, which can create a downward spiral.
Codependency also refers to enabling others to continue in their addictions. You may feel that you should not make demands or bring up how the addictive behavior is affecting. You may have trouble setting limits on what is acceptable to you.
If you are codependent, you may feel guilty if you dare to put yourself first. You may have been brought up to believe that this is sinful. You may think that your purpose in life is to be there for others. But if that purpose is not balanced with love and concern for yourself there are usually negative consequences, such as imbalanced relationships and emotional exhaustion.
Therapy can help you to understand how you have become codependent, and loosen the grip which that conditioning has on you. It can help you form a new relationship with yourself that will leave you feeling more energized, joyful and authentically connected to others.
Depression can cause you to feel deep sadness much of the time, or conversely, to be easily provoked into irritability and anger. People who are depressed frequently feel that life is an unrewarding and constant drudgery for which there is no relief. In extreme cases, depression can lead to suicidal thoughts.
Many people who struggle emotionally don’t realized that they are depressed. They may attribute their state of mind to the circumstances of their lives and believe they can’t feel any differently until those circumstances change. But it is actually the other way around. Depression disempowers you, and distorts your experience of yourself and the world. When depression eases, the ability to reflect on one’s circumstances, next steps and new possibilities grows.
Some symptoms of depression include
- feeling helpless and hopeless about the future,
- feelings of worthlessness or self blame.
- loss of interest in and enjoyment of activities that you used to make you happy
- lack of motivation
- difficulty concentrating, remembering things or making decisions;
- fatigue even when you have slept well
- insomnia or oversleeping
Therapy helps you to understand how your personal history has led to your depression and the patterns of thinking and emotional experiencing that go with it. Shedding light on depression in this way can release you from it’s grip. Knowing that you have a safe and dependable therapy relationship can lessen feelings of aloneness, which is an important part of healing.
Adjusting to divorce is one of the most difficult experiences adults can go through, whether or not the divorce was not your choice. So much of who you thought you were and what your life was about is no longer true. Those first nights alone can feel startlingly bleak and impossible to bear. Your sense of the future can also be altered. It may be impossible to imagine that your life can be full again, or that you can even make it on your own. Others may expect you to feel relief if you are the one who made the choice to divorce, but the emotional reality is much more complicated than that. Feelings of anger, shame, failure and confusion are experienced by most people going through this. Therapy is a safe place to bring your emotional turmoil, self doubts, fear and loneliness as well as your hopes for the future. Working through this most difficult transition by sharing and giving space to all of the emotional facets of the end of your marriage can bring healing that will ready you for the next chapter in your life.
When we lose someone significant in our life a part of ourselves goes with them. This is usually not conscious because of the immediacy of the pain, and perhaps shock that can be all consuming. Sometimes there is just numbness which means that the feelings are just too much to bear right away. But intense sadness and emptiness will follow and stay, sometimes longer than we think, or others tell us they should.
The truth is that grief cannot be hurried. It has a life of it’s own. But it can be honored, and that is where therapy comes in. Going through the history and understanding the unique meanings of the lost relationship is what grief demands of us. If we give it what it demands it slowly lets go of the control it has over us and allows us to be open to new experience. We do not find a replacement for our lost ones, but our new emotional openness sets the conditions for life to take us to places we might not have imagined.
Racism, sexism, homophobia and religious discrimination can be present in every aspect of life, including government policies, educational and professional institutions, the work world, social groups and interpersonal relationships. Emotional injury and/or trauma as a result of othering, marginalization and/or discrimination can be hard to talk about. It might be hard to put your finger on exactly what you think happened or why you feel hurt and confused. It is hard to know what conscious and unconscious motives are at play in the way you are treated and spoken to. Therapy is a place where you can process identity-based trauma and stress, as well as the effects of internalized oppression.
Therapy can assist couples with addressing the unconscious dynamics of racism, classism or sexism which may be contributing to relationship impasses. Therapy can also help couples understand the nuances of how cultural differences contribute to misunderstandings and conflict. It can be relieving to see things from this perspective, rather than one person being right and the other wrong. Understanding how identity dynamics affect the relationships helps couples transcend power dynamics that are out of balance.
The discovery of a spouse’s affair can be traumatic and devastating to both the discoverer and the discovered. The discoverer of the infidelity can feel like the way they have come to experience their world has been shattered. The self that the discovered thought they were and who everyone else knew them as, can also feel shattered. Because of this couples rarely process the emotions involved on their own. Instead, either there is a kind of emotional standoff where the relationship never really feels the same, or the relationship ends prematurely without a chance to understand and work through the complexity of the trauma and see things in a more nuanced way. Sometimes spouses will have an affair to unconsciously get back at their spouse who had one first.
If an affair is discovered it is important to seriously consider getting help as a couple to work through the emotional trauma where things feel so out of control. A therapist can help you and your spouse take a deep dive into what led to one spouse going outside the relationship. Once this is understood and feelings have been addressed things can look quite different. Decisions about what moving forward will look like can be made not as a response to an emergency but as something deeply thought through and considered.
If you are lonely it might be a little comforting to know that you are actually not alone. Many sources report loneliness as a pandemic in this country, one that can have profound and serious effects on mental and physical health and how well we cope with aging. Many factors may contribute to feeling isolated, such as illness, relocation, divorce, loss of a loved one, retirement, aging, or cultural, linguistic or political difference from the mainstream. It is a fact that many people spend more time at home with their spouses or families than they used to, rather than going out or joining groups and clubs.
That being said, some people just have difficulty forming and maintaining healthy relationships with others. If this is true for you, you may wish more than anything, to have a partner and/or groups of friends, but somehow it keeps not working out. Many times these situations involve a vicious cycle where a loss in confidence in your ability to socialize and connect affects how you are with others, leading to more rejection.
Therapy is very helpful in overcoming isolation. Support is available for exploring what is in the way of spending more quality time with people that you want to connect with. A therapist can also work with you on a deeper level to understand and transform patterns of relating that get in the way of making satisfying and lasting connections
Sometimes life changes are a natural and expected part of development over your life span. Examples are graduations, first jobs, marriage, becoming parents or retirement. Sometimes a change in life circumstances is something that you have been able to carefully consider for a while, such as relocation or career change. Other times life itself foists enormous changes upon you that you cannot plan for, leaving you to feel like you have little choice but to adapt. Examples of the latter are major changes in health, job loss, loss of spouse or others we are close to, and unexpected effects of aging.
A change in life can require changes in how you have been thinking and feeling about yourself, others and the world in order to cope. You can experience uncertainty, fear and perhaps feeling out of control. You may be faced with the loss of parts of yourself that have formed your core identity, such as your life’s purpose, personal values and what comes to mind when you think of “me.” You may feel anxious about having to adapt to new realities that you feel unprepared for.
Therapy can help you understand and contain the emotional chaos and anxiety that can come with big life changes. Having a safe person to navigate this path with can be very important, especially if everyone around you has their own ideas about what you should or shouldn’t be doing. A good therapist listens on a deeper level, and helps you to develop and integrate the internal changes that will enable you to move forward and renew your relationship with yourself.
Difficulties in relationships, whether with spouses, family members, colleagues, or close friends, is the number one reason people come to therapy. There are so many challenges that arise while navigating the ins and outs of dynamics with those we are close with and/or depend on.
Therapy can help with a wide range of relationship challenges, especially when there is conflict or emotional estrangement. It can help with communication, emotional and physical intimacy, fear of abandonment, jealousy, and setting and respecting healthy boundaries. In addition, therapy helps improve empathy for oneself and others, leading to increased mutual understanding, closeness and connection.
If you find that you frequently feel “less than” others, have difficulty with setting boundaries, and/or frequently fear rejection, you are probably struggling with low self esteem.
Low self esteem can build upon itself. For example, not standing up for yourself because you don’t feel deserving can lead others to disrespect and perhaps actually reject you in a self-perpetuating downward spiral. Other signs of low self esteem include feeling not good enough, feeling like you’re a fraud fooling everyone, an intense need for validation from others and/or avoidance of challenges and new situations.
Everyone has a unique set of attributes, some of which are experienced as strengths and some as weaknesses. You may not have had the help you needed in life to regard yourself as just human, with strengths and weaknesses like everyone else. Therapy to address low self esteem can help you understand how you have come to think and feel about yourself in ways that are hurtful. With this understanding you can develop a different kind of relationship with yourself, increasing your ability to be okay with just being you.
If you find yourself “losing your religion,” you are not alone. The religious landscape of the U.S. has been changing for some time. More and more people are migrating away from traditional organized religious practice and moving towards a more individualized relationship with God or a higher power, or a more secular life in general. Many people are comfortable with this, but others can struggle with guilt or even fear about the consequences. You may be struggling with conflict between your personal values and religious teachings, which can bring up confusion about your identity and what your beliefs actually are. It may become apparent that you need to work out your own personal relationship with God, if you believe in one.
If you have a spiritual practice such as meditation, questions can arise about the relationship between your feelings and spiritual teachings. For example, Buddhism speaks of aggression as one of the poisons of the mind. But how does that work in everyday life, especially in these times? Is it as simple as that?
Therapy can support you in exploring your everyday lived experience with your religious and spiritual beliefs. It can be very helpful to work this out with a caring professional who has no investment in you adhering to one particular belief system or another.
These are stressful times! Therapy can help identify the particular sources of your stress, and your patterns of engaging with them that may be making things feel worse. For example, you may find yourself irritable, placing unrealistic demands on yourself and/or others, always expecting the worst, or avoiding new situations, sticking to what feels safe. When stressed, It is hard to think straight and stay organized. It can become easier and easier to procrastinate to the point where your “to do” list overwhelms you.
Therapy can also help with coping strategies to lessen stress in the moment. A safe and supportive therapy relationship lowers the overall stress in your life because you know someone is there to bring it to who will maintain a steady, thoughtful and nonjudgmental interest in your experience. In this relationship it becomes less difficult for you to face sources of stress and your relationship to them.