Listening....

This process of talking and listening not only feels strange, it often doesn’t make sense to people: how are we going to fix my problem by talking about other things? While many people find short term, very concrete, or solution focused approaches to therapy attractive, these approaches fundamentally rely on a perspective that you, or your current experiences, are a problem to be solved. This is very different from the way that I approach therapy, and the individuals I encounter. Though your current thoughts or feelings may indeed be quite problematic and painful, they are parts of you, and they therefor contain important messages. Further, psychological research has demonstrated that when we apply a superficial solution to a problem with more depth, we often find ourselves with a sudden new symptom, situation, or issue. 

This is why I use untangling to refer to my work, rather than helping, fixing, or solving.  Because of my depth oriented approach, we won’t focus on one single thing in therapy together, but will look at all the pieces of you – including thoughts, emotions, past experiences, dreams, fantasies, interpersonal relationships, institutions you belong to, systems you were raised in, and ways you feel in your own body – and how they have come together to create the situation you find yourself in now.