My Approach
Major Principles
Relational
The trust we build between us as people, the real relationship between us, is foundational. Our relationship can lend you the capacity to try difficult new things, model new ways of relating to yourself and others, and create opportunities to be met in the ways you’ve always wanted to be.
Respectful
I respect your process and experience. I offer opportunities to expand your range of options, and I understand that deep change is only possible once you have been accepted exactly as you are.
Curious
I approach your experience with friendly curiosity, a genuine desire to understand. We can ask questions together, try things on, and run experiments to test our ideas - no one has the answer, but we can find your answer together.
Yin & Yang
A therapist who only listens and nods is not very helpful, but neither is a therapist who prescribes lots of exercises but doesn’t really get you. Good therapy offers the right balance of being and doing, a dynamic responsiveness which is both spacious and actively engaged.
Direct Experience
Change happens in the here and now through contact with your direct experience. It’s easy to stay trapped in the world of thought, isolated from feeling, but it’s also an alienating and deadening way to exist. I will help you come into contact with what’s really happening for you at a pace that’s safe for you, and help you reconnect with your own aliveness.
Courageous
Turning towards the truth can be painful, but avoiding it is always worse in the long run. Things happen in their own time, and I never rush or push, but when it is time to go to the depths, I will help you.
“What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.”
-Eugene T. Gendlin