How You and I Work Together

What therapy is, to me: Therapy is a process of building a trusting, close relationship with someone with whom you can share the most difficult parts of your life — your past and your present — and then working through better ways of understanding and living with them. The safety of that relationship matters enormously. But so does my willingness to challenge you: to help you see things, and your own role in them, differently from how you might on your own.

Where the healing comes from: The deepest healing comes from learning to love yourself more fully. That doesn't mean accepting everything about yourself as fine. It means building the kind of genuine self-acceptance that gives you the courage to look honestly at your patterns — how you relate to others, and what you've come to expect — and to change them.

Safety first — and then honesty: Sometimes therapy provides listening and reassurance, and there is real value in being heard, especially if you don't have people in your life who will simply sit with you. But that isn't where I stop. I don't only listen and agree. When the time is right, I challenge by offering interpretations that help you make connections leading to deep change and not just comfort in the moment. A feeling of safety has to be at the heart of everything; it’s what enables you to hear harder truths and look at your life more fully.

Learning from difficult feelings: Many people come in wanting a painful feeling — such as sadness or worry — to go away. Often there really is depression or anxiety. But the most helpful approach is usually not to suppress those feelings, but to understand what they're trying to tell you. Sometimes sadness and worry are important signals, signs that something in your life needs to change. We work gradually — staying with difficult feelings rather than avoiding them, and discovering that even intense distress passes, and that you are strong enough to face it.

The longer arc: Many of the people I work with stay in therapy over time. Often the difficulty that first brought them in turns out to rest on deeper, more recurring patterns, and as those come into view, the work broadens — toward more successful relationships with others, with your work, and with yourself.