Individual Therapy

My therapeutic orientation is rooted in a deep respect for a person’s inherent ability to grow and heal. I believe you have the strengths and abilities to transform already within you. My approach is to assist you in accessing and cultivating these strengths and abilities. I believe transformation happens through a collaborative therapeutic relationship that is infused with trust, respect and compassion. In this context you can cultivate your inherent wisdom to meet your current difficulty with compassion and understanding allowing for healthy and natural solutions to arise.

Everyone seeks therapy because of some discord in their life. Your discord may be experienced as anxiety, grief, depression, restlessness, fear, doubt or self-blame. I use a variety of reflective techniques including Focusing, mindfulness, and other somatic approaches that allow you to turn toward the discord with gentleness and kindness. This process fosters access to your inherent wisdom in the moment to facilitate creating behavior change and improving emotional and mental well-being. Your therapeutic journey is one of discovery at your own pace that often does not follow a linear or prescribed path. It is a journey that is not without emotional risk or guaranteed destinations. As you turn toward the discord, discomfort is to be expected as it’s a natural response to emotional challenges. My intention is to work with you to build an emotionally safe and respectful relationship to accompany you on your journey of healing and meaning-making.

I understand that individuals do not exist in isolation. You belong to numerous systems that have varying degrees of influence on your well-being and that you have varying degrees of control over. These systems include family, neighborhood, places of worship, and place of employment to name just a few. Your ability to control and influence a system is highly informed by power and social positioning that is correlated with economic status, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, and education level among other factors. I look at a person’s socioeconomic context while exploring needs, understanding that the exploration and pursuit toward well-being involves exploring your relationships with multiple systems both past and present.

Focusing

Focusing began with Eugene Gendlin’s research at the University of Chicago near the middle of the Twentieth century. In collaboration with Carl Rogers, Gendlin studied the aspects of therapy that lead to lasting healthy change. He found that it was inherent qualities the individual brought to therapy rather than any therapeutic methodology that lead consistently to change. Particularly it was the way individual’s related to their inner experience. From this insight the practice of Focusing was established to help cultivate this manner of relating to inner experience and it continues to be developed to this day.

Focusing is a process and a practice of working with or relating to one’s own experience. It brings into focus (from which the practice derives its name) the raw data of one’s present moment experience, referred to as the “felt sense”. The “felt sense” is often difficult to put into words and often ignored or covered up in our busy and demanding lives. Focusing is an act of giving attention and space to the “felt sense” in order to find symbolic representation for the experience, such as words, metaphors, images or movements. This can result in a “felt shift”, a movement of the experience toward healing and meaning-making.

As a practitioner of and guide for Focusing I have found it to be a transformative process that relies heavily on awareness of present moment experience and intuition. It purposely sets aside our strong tendencies to “fix” or “judge” our experience allowing natural changes and solutions to arise from an inherent wisdom. Focusing was intentionally made freely available by Gendlin without exercising trademark or patent rights. It forms the foundation for some widely used and effective therapies including Hakomi, Somatic Experiencing, and Body Psychotherapy. If you’re interested in learning more about Focusing or scheduling a Focusing session please contact me.

Adolescents

My general approach is similar with adolescents as adults with the added recognition of the unique challenges experienced by adolescents. Developing an identity and purpose and navigating everchanging peer relationships, especially in the era of social media, is challenging even in the best of circumstances. Today’s youth are transitioning into adulthood under unprecedented circumstances including an ongoing pandemic, economic uncertainty, civil unrest, and climate disruption. Our youth are coming of age in an historic and transitional time as awareness of inequality and its impacts are being more clearly seen while systems perpetuating this inequality remain in place. My intention is to accompany and assist in guiding youth toward groundedness, understanding and purpose.