My Approach

My approach to psychotherapy is relational, engaging & pragmatic. Psychotherapy is a personal process, and I believe that it is important that successful therapy lead to changes in your daily life:

• How you function.
• How satisfied you feel about yourself and your relationships.

Relationships, including yours with a therapist, are powerful and transformative. Our work will include understanding yourself better by exploring the internal world of feelings and thoughts and the external world of relationships:

• Personal relationships of past and present
• Work relationships
• Our relationship

I believe that our interaction is not only a collaboration but can also shed light on understanding yourself and others. Theoretically I call my approach interpersonal/relational although I utilize and draw from other psychodynamic approaches when it is useful for our work and supports our talking together.

It is often said that we learn from our experience. This is true if we can think about what we have lived through. While dissatisfaction, perhaps desperation or suffering, may initially motivate someone to seek psychotherapy, eventually one develops an openness for sorting through obstacles and inhibitions to satisfaction, perhaps discovering self-defeating patterns.

My job is to help you to talk. Psychotherapy with me is a process of becoming aware and giving voice to feelings and thoughts, facing difficult experiences of the past or present, learning to have all your feelings, establishing new behaviors, and creating a new framework of understanding. This process ultimately leads to new relationships with oneself and others as well as opening up possibilities.

Some individuals have a number of very good questions about psychotherapy from the start:

• How long might things take?
• Have you worked with someone like me before?
• Do you think you can help me?

The duration of any psychotherapy depends on what you want to accomplish. I have had experience working with many issues, yet I believe that each person’s psychotherapy is original and unique. Through the years my experience had led me to think of myself much like an expert river navigator. While knowledgeable and experienced, I have never been down your river before. I am interested and willing to be of whatever help I might be, and I am willing to find out if I can be helpful to you.

Ours will be a collaborative effort.