My Approach
I believe therapy is an open, cooperative, and collaborative process between myself and my clients. Your job is to bring yourself and your goals about what you want to be different in your life; my job is to do my very best to understand where you are coming from, help you discover what is getting in the way of you making the changes you want to make, and actively support you in creative and effective ways to help you make those changes.
Goals
Sometimes clients come in with very specific goals to work on; other times we work together to figure out what a client's goals are. And, as therapy goes forward and a client changes, goals also evolve and get updated. I ask my clients to set goals for a number of reasons. First, a goal helps to set a direction and focus for therapy - we know where we are going. Second, having a goal allows a client to track their progress, see how their therapy is actually progressing, be able to recognize what's working and even more importantly, what's not working. Goals help to make therapy measurable, instead of "magical".
Strategies
Understanding and insight are one aspect of therapy, but not the whole of therapy. Clients also want to know "what to do" differently. Strategies help to provide concrete workable, alternative approaches to unhelpful, automatic, repetitive responses. One of my goals for my clients is that they know what to do when problematic situations arise outside my office. These situations might include a highly emotional response to a situation, a pervasive pattern of rumination that is dominating their thoughts, an inability to say "no" to an unwanted request, or a need to "down-regulate" their thoughts and their body in a high-stress environment. Clients learn effective strategies and skills for a range of issues when working with me in therapy. And, since change is an active process over time and there truly is no one size fits all, I bringing a flexible and curious approach to my work with my clients, drawing from an ever-evolving toolkit filled with a wide variety of resources from my background and training.
My Therapeutic Style
I am a perceptive, interactive therapist with an open, genuine, warm, direct, validating, and non-judgmental style. I value accepting my clients, and myself, where ever we are in the moment, while also problem-solving for the moments that will inevitably follow.
Goals
Sometimes clients come in with very specific goals to work on; other times we work together to figure out what a client's goals are. And, as therapy goes forward and a client changes, goals also evolve and get updated. I ask my clients to set goals for a number of reasons. First, a goal helps to set a direction and focus for therapy - we know where we are going. Second, having a goal allows a client to track their progress, see how their therapy is actually progressing, be able to recognize what's working and even more importantly, what's not working. Goals help to make therapy measurable, instead of "magical".
Strategies
Understanding and insight are one aspect of therapy, but not the whole of therapy. Clients also want to know "what to do" differently. Strategies help to provide concrete workable, alternative approaches to unhelpful, automatic, repetitive responses. One of my goals for my clients is that they know what to do when problematic situations arise outside my office. These situations might include a highly emotional response to a situation, a pervasive pattern of rumination that is dominating their thoughts, an inability to say "no" to an unwanted request, or a need to "down-regulate" their thoughts and their body in a high-stress environment. Clients learn effective strategies and skills for a range of issues when working with me in therapy. And, since change is an active process over time and there truly is no one size fits all, I bringing a flexible and curious approach to my work with my clients, drawing from an ever-evolving toolkit filled with a wide variety of resources from my background and training.
My Therapeutic Style
I am a perceptive, interactive therapist with an open, genuine, warm, direct, validating, and non-judgmental style. I value accepting my clients, and myself, where ever we are in the moment, while also problem-solving for the moments that will inevitably follow.
Wisdom is the ability to see things just as they are, not how we think they should be......