I practice psychotherapy for a wide range of difficulties. This includes feeling stuck or unfulfilled, depression and anxieties, self-destructive patterns of relating to others, family history issues, life transitions, sexuality, and post-traumatic conditions and dissociative states. Many people I see have experienced subtle, developmental trauma accumulated over many years.

Most of my psychotherapy practice involves one meeting per week, but I do also see people twice a week or more. Some people see me for only a few sessions, then feel that is enough to regroup and move on. Others see me for years rather than months. I like to work holistically and in depth, so that people feel they achieve not only symptom relief but also a deeper and more resilient sense of themselves and an improved quality of life.

The moods, activities, feelings, and thoughts that don’t make sense to us — what we call symptoms — draw our attention to the wider contexts in which they are embedded and from which they emerged. I am generally more interested in what symptoms might be trying to tell us than in simply trying to remove them or to help people manage them. If symptoms are adequately attended to and worked through in this way then there may no longer be symptoms to “manage.” This is what healing and integration mean. I share this view with  the psychoanalytic, Jungian, humanistic, and phenomenological  traditions.

These overlapping traditions all regard psychotherapy as a professional relationship in which we can seriously think about ourselves and our circumstances. The professional frame makes it safe, at times, to be very personal indeed. Through psychotherapy we often come to feel more responsive but less reactive to events. Instead we feel more appropriately engaged, with a sense of self that feels more embodied, spacious, and grounded. Our boundaries might feel more secure but less rigid, and flexible without being exhaustingly permeable. Many of us are able to lay to rest those “demons” that haunt our memories and dreams, and which prevent us from living more fulfilling lives. We also may come to see both others and ourselves more clearly, usually in more nuanced and complex ways.

I work with people from diverse backgrounds, and with marginalized populations of various kinds. My professional commitment is to work without a political or religious (or other) agenda. On the other hand, when and as appropriate, I do address the toxic, deep seated forms of racism, sexism, and other issues of privilege and power in our society, since these affect not only our interpersonal and social lives, but our internal relations with ourselves as well. Conversations that include these issues are welcome in my practice. I think it only right to make explicit that black lives matter to me.