Individual Therapy

People come to therapy because something hurts or isn’t working.

Sometimes you know exactly what you want help with—a relationship, anxiety, depression, grief, or a difficult life transition. Sometimes you simply have the feeling that life has become smaller than it ought to be, or that you are no longer satisfied with the direction your life is taking.

Therapy follows different paths.

Some concerns can be addressed in a relatively brief period of therapy. Others gradually reveal deeper patterns that have developed over many years. Rather than deciding in advance how long therapy should last, we pay attention to where your questions lead us.

Together we become curious about your difficulties.

Many approaches to therapy focus primarily on reducing symptoms or changing patterns of thinking and behavior. Those approaches can be very helpful, and many people benefit from them.

My own work invites a different kind of question. Rather than asking only, “How do I stop feeling this?” you and I also become curious about why these feelings developed in the first place. What purpose has this response served? What has it been protecting? Why does this response make sense in light of your life? To that end, the more you can tell me about your hopes, your dreams, all the ways you have struggled to become more fully yourself, the more we can discover together.

Your history helps us understand the present.

Families, important relationships, losses, culture, and the larger social world all shape how we come to understand ourselves, our emotions, and our place with other people.

Our relationship becomes part of what we study.

As we work together, our relationship becomes another place where we learn. Feelings that arise between us—trust, hesitation, disappointment, hope, anger, closeness, uncertainty—can help us understand patterns that occur in other important relationships in your life.

Understanding becomes something you can feel.

Insight can be an important beginning. Lasting change, however, often comes from repeatedly experiencing yourself differently. Reactions that once felt like personal failures begin to make sense in the context of your life. As you experience being known rather than judged, you may begin to relate to yourself with greater compassion, confidence, and emotional freedom.

New experiences change how you experience yourself.

Over time, something begins to shift inside. The curiosity, steadiness, acceptance, and confidence that you experience in therapy gradually become capacities you carry with you. Instead of relying entirely on someone else’s perspective, you begin to develop a stronger, kinder, and more resilient relationship with yourself.

You take that stronger self back into the world.

Therapy does not eliminate disappointment, conflict, loss, or uncertainty. But many people discover that they meet these experiences differently. Relationships become less governed by fear. Difficult emotions become more tolerable. Other people’s reactions carry less power to define who you are. You become freer to love, to risk, to recover, and to be more fully yourself.