Slowing down....

In all of our lives, we face moments of difficulty: times when the road ahead seems unclear, we aren’t sure if we’ve made the right choice, or we falter at the cards it seems we’ve been handed. The pace of the everyday world often urges us not to slow down, or to look at things more closely in these moments of difficulty. Rather than examine the reality of our emotional experience or the ways in which we are living that we don’t want to be, we often choose to simply look the other way: drowning out our problems with television, alcohol, or drugs, running ourselves ragged with exhausting work days, lashing out at the ones we love, or using skills that used to work, but now we find aren’t quite doing the job anymore.

I see my work as a therapist as helping my clients to slow down, take stock, and start to untangle the threads of their lives. Often we don’t quite know how it is we got to the place we are – we may know we are unhappy, anxious, depressed, or despairing, but the reasons why, or the journey to how is obscured. I use listening, questioning, linking, and highlighting to encourage clients to be curious about themselves, and to question and wonder about connections that they may not have previously been able to see, feel validated in, or work out further.