About You

Breaking free from old patterns is challenging.

You’re in pain and looking for help. Depression keeps sapping your life’s energy. Anxiety has you churning inside, and self-criticism cuts at you constantly. Friends can only listen for so long. Well-meaning advice makes you feel worse and causes you to realize that you need something more profound than advice.

Breaking free from old patterns and habits is something you desire but are afraid of getting hurt and disappointing others. Your unhappiness doesn’t just affect you; it impacts the people in your life and frays your relationships with them. You find yourself getting into conflicts or withdrawing from others to avoid conflicts.

Intellectually, you know there are things you could do to improve your situation, but you can’t find the will to move forward. You’re doing your best to fake your way through and don’t want people to know how much you are struggling.

While growing up, you believed you needed to be harshly critical of yourself to accomplish anything. That’s how your parents treated themselves. But now, you yearn for a life in which you are not your worst critic.

Therapy helps you break free from the past.

Psychotherapy is about connecting with your deepest resources – your most authentic self. This form of therapy emphasizes understanding and releasing patterns that no longer serve you and being free to pursue your actual needs.

Breaking free is not work you can do alone. You need a mature and skillful guide who can work with you in the present moment to help you be free of the past and free in the future. It’s important to have someone you trust so you feel supported to go to places that might be scary.

The past shapes us, but therapy happens in the present, and your life unfolds in the future. You are fortunate to be seeking help when the field of psychotherapy is making significant advances. The insights of neurobiology, the understanding and treatment of trauma, the mapping out of attachment styles, and the importance of body awareness have added significantly to the effectiveness of therapy.

Therapy usually begins with your problems and how you suffer, but its goal is to identify your strengths and help you reach your goals.

The focus is on you – and your story.

In the beginning, therapy starts with you telling your story and me listening. Having a coherent story about your past and present life is beneficial. I listen carefully to how you judge and reject yourself and invite you to give those parts the same kindness you would provide to a suffering child. Compassion and self-acceptance are where your evolution of growth can begin.

Your therapy won’t be exactly like anyone else’s. It’s something we will create together in response to your specific needs. You are the expert on you, and my expertise will support you in going deep. We will pool our knowledge in connecting with your inner capacities.

I’m good at listening.

Research shows that the connection between the client and the therapist is one of the most vital aspects of effective therapy. The process requires that you go deep and be vulnerable, which won’t happen unless you can trust. One of our first tasks will be to establish that connection between us – my job is to hear what you have to say with curiosity and accept your story nonjudgmentally. I’m good at that.

You must tell me what is most important to you at that moment. I realize that expressing inner feelings takes courage. But remember, you are not there to chat because therapy is unlike any other conversation. You’ll know what’s most important because it’s scary or exciting. It’s at the edge of what you know about yourself.

Suffering and crisis can allow you to discover your deepest capacity, the very thing missing from your life. Effective therapy is more valuable than any material possession.