The Work

I believe most people entering therapy are seeking a fuller experience of being alive. They want to experience less suffering, less fear and constriction, less conflict in relationships, more of a sense of connectedness, effectiveness, and satisfaction, more access to their creative spirit, more openness, clarity, and purpose.

Sometimes the idea of therapy gets mixed up with fixing something that is broken. This is not how I view therapy. I work with people who are in the midst of lives that are complicated and messy, people with unique histories and individual tendencies, and I help them develop compassion for the profoundly challenging task of being human. If you think you are broken, how can you possibly imagine you have the inner resources to meet life’s demands?

Therapy is a place where you can address the attitudes you have about yourself, your emotions, and your inner life that cause you to suffer and limit you. Therapy is a place where you can learn and practice, in a safe environment, how to engage in the task of discovering your fuller potential.

This isn’t something we are taught in school. In fact, for many of us, socialization and learning served to pit us against ourselves, to be focused on being a socially prized way at the cost of losing sight of who we truly are. In therapy, we sort these messages out, we look at the patterns and meaning you make out of your experience. Once you develop awareness about the patterns that shape your way of relating to yourself and others, you are able to make choices about being in your life in a different way.

Even if you choose to continue with well-worn, familiar patterns of being in the world, the act of choosing is profoundly powerful and can lead you to shift from experiencing your life as something that happens to you to experiencing your life as something you actively create.