My specialty areas include:
- Anxiety & Depression
- Body Image Issues & Eating Disorders (please read this description of my general approach to these issues)
- Addiction & Co-Dependency
- Sexual Orientation and Gender Issues
- Trauma (however, I do not work with people who have Dissociative Identity Disorder as it is outside my scope of practice)
I work only with adults (i.e. people who are no longer living with, nor financially dependent upon, their parents) in individual counseling.
Reasons people come to see me include:
Significant or Chronic Emotional Distress
Most people seek therapy to relieve pain or distress. While experiencing emotional pain is part of being human, sometimes this distress is severe or long-standing and it threatens to impair your daily life. Therapy might be appropriate for you if you feel emotional distress that is persistent and troubling. In psychotherapy you could:
- Learn to heal through painful emotions by uncovering the function as well as wisdom of the darker emotions such as sadness, anxiety, anger, shame, guilt, and depression.
- Learn the function of addiction and/or co-dependency and discover the work your compulsions are directing you towards.
- Turn body dissatisfaction into body acceptance using coping tools that enhance the life you want to lead rather than detract from it.
Relationship Problems
Emotional distress often comes from difficulty in relationships. Troubled relationships may involve a spouse, parent, child, coworker or significant other. Psychotherapy can help you understand the root of the problem and provide you with the tools you need to correct it. Enhance self-discovery and self-knowledge through exploration of how you manage work, parenting, relationships, and sex.
Skills Acquisition
Some emotional distress or relationship problems are associated with the lack of a particular skill. Such problems can include excessive shyness, perfectionism, poor self-esteem, or inadequate stress management tools. Many types of psychotherapy enable people to acquire or improve these skills. In these cases, the treatment focuses on teaching people to be able to do what they need to do to feel better.
Recent Loss or Transition
Powerful attachments to others are an inescapable human experience. Enduring breaks in these attachments through death or separation can result in great emotional pain. Psychotherapy can help you cope with the loss as well as rebuild relationships in its aftermath (for example, co-parenting in divorce). Transitions are also an inescapable part of life: coming out as LGBT; leaving home; becoming an adult; becoming a parent; adjusting to a new community; changing careers; divorcing; starting to date again; kids leaving home; adjusting to a distressing medical diagnosis; retirement; and aging just to name a few.
Abuse and Trauma
Being the victim of physical or sexual abuse or another form of trauma (such as being in an automobile accident or combat), can overwhelm your capacity to cope and leave scars that impair your ability to live a normal life. Psychotherapy can provide a confidential arena to discuss these issues with a caring, supportive professional. By focusing on healing the wound caused by the trauma, psychotherapy can help you move forward with your life from victim and survivor to thriver.
Tools in My Therapeutic Toolbox:
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
- Analogy and Metaphor
- Boundaries
- Communication Styles
- Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
- Feminist Therapy
- Health at Every Size
- Internal Family Systems (IFS)
- Intuitive Eating
- Language of Emotions
- Mindfulness
- Motivational Interviewing
- Narrative Therapy
- Neurobiology
- Personality Styles
- Self-Compassion
- Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (Level I)
- Stages of Change