Anxiety and Depression
Both depression and anxiety are crafty and painful, and sometimes feel like they're taking over your life. While worry, sadness and loss happen to everyone—they're a realistic and important part of life— when dealing with them keeps you from living fully, it’s time to look into the issues further and learn where and when the emotions can be controlled. My approach looks at your past (earned sadness and anger about what you’ve lost, what’s been taken, or what you regret); your present (living in the moment and accepting both the good and the bad) and your future (channeling hope and faith in order to plan for better days ahead).
The first step on the road to relieving mood instability is to combine techniques that soothe both your mind and your body. My approach is multi-dimensional, helping you learn to examine and label your thoughts, relax and calm your body’s reactions, and find support from others (friends, family, support groups, therapists and clergy are a good starting place) to control worry. Together, we can tame anxiety and see it as it really is: a tormenting bully that needs to be erased.
Emotional Intimacy in Relationships
Communication between any two people is complicated. How we experience something will never be exactly the same as how someone else experiences it, and our ability to see the world through another's eyes is limited. This is true with our parents, partners, friends, coworkers, children. Therapy is the right place to find which parts of communication you can control—in other words, your part, and only your part.
In fact, sometimes relationship issues are best solved in individual therapy. In order to explore why you’re upset by what someone else says, you have to know your own triggers and be able to soothe them. Otherwise, many conflicts are read as an attack, and responded to with defensiveness. By looking for patterns in your relationships, what has worked and what hasn't, we can pinpoint places where intimacy can be deepened, conflict can be avoided, and your own triggers can be healed.
Achievement Focused Professionals
Do you look great on paper, but still struggle with feeling not good enough?
Have you hit most of your goals and are wondering why you don’t feel more satisfied?
Are you driven, busy and successful, but suspect that you use this hyper productivity to mask insecurities and self-doubt?
We can use your strengths—intelligence, curiosity, ambition and commitment—to make the next project you work on, yourself. By examining where you came from, what defense mechanisms you created, and how you walk through the world right now in both ways that work for you and ways that don’t, we can build compassion and acceptance, for yourself and for the people you love.
Working with Therapists
I offer consultation, supervision and psychotherapy for professionals in the mental health field.
One of my favorite parts about working with mental health professionals is their ongoing, unswerving commitment to personal growth. Therapists know that when we understand our own triggers and wounds, we can best soothe them, put them to the side and focus on our clients without reservation. I provide individual and triadic supervision for prelicensed therapists, consultation for licensed professionals, and depth psychology therapy for anyone in the field.
Breaking Free from Shame
When children are not treasured or even seen as well as they deserve, they can grow up to have a hard time knowing who they are, what’s important to them other than outside approval, and how to feel okay when anyone else is upset. The result is often a deep feeling of shame, a sense that somehow we are never quite good enough. I work with clients to build self-esteem, offer themselves the acceptance they didn't get as a child, and learn to set and hold boundaries, in order to create stronger and more fulfilling relationships.
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It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.
E.E. Cummings
