How I Work

People come to me at various points of their life. A parent's illness or death. A marriage that's ending or situationship that hasn't evolved into a committed relationship. A new baby. A job that looks fantastic on paper, but you are deeply unsatisfied and miserable. Sometimes there's no particular event at all, only a long-running sense that something is off. Much of my work is with individuals struggling with anxiety, trauma, grief and relationships.

There are many kinds of therapy that focus on the distressing, perhaps debilitating symptom(s) themselves. If you aren't falling asleep fast enough, you learn to box breathe. If you are struggling with your weight you educate yourself on a new diet plan or see a nutritionist. If you have social anxiety, you learned the "5-4-3-2-1 technique." These are useful and for some problems they're enough.

Our work goes somewhere else, though. We look at where a pattern started – where the fear began, where the anger comes from or the ruminating thoughts before bedtime. Together, we want to understand what it was protecting you from at the time and how it's still operating now. When you begin to understand the origin of where these problems stem from, the symptom usually loses some of its grip on its own.

The aim is not only to feel better in the short term. In fact, if I am being honest, you might even feel a bit worse as this information is brought to light.

But I will listen thoughtfully to what you are saying to find the nucleus and how it relates to your problems today, so that you change the relationship you have with yourself — which is what tends to hold.

The first one to four sessions are our assessment period. This is a real part of the work, not a formality. You tell me what's brought you here and something about your history. I ask questions. You get a sense of how I actually work, which is difficult to know from reading about it.

At the end we talk plainly about what I think might be going on, whether I'm the right therapist for your problems and what a course of treatment would involve — how often we'd meet and roughly what to expect. From there, we decide together what makes the most sense for your treatment.

I see individuals and couples. At a minimum, I meet with people once a week and some more frequently depending on what you want to work on. The frequency and cadence that we work matters more here than in some other kinds of therapy because patterns become visible over time and a steady rhythm is what makes that possible.