I’m fortunate to have trained with leading clinicians and it’s been my privilege to have helped hundreds of clients over nearly twenty years of practice. Still, while I may have useful experience and expertise, I am not the expert on your life. Only you know what it’s like to be you. Only you can describe what you’re feeling and identify what you most need (even if you’re not sure yet). There’s no way to do this kind of work except to do it together. My role is to create the right conditions for you to have the sorts of honest conversations with yourself that move things forward, one shift at a time, one step at a time. When the truth of the matter meets the heart of the matter, something powerful happens.
In therapy we take turns. You tell me about what’s important to you and I listen. I help you find the next step and support you in taking it. Having reached new ground, you get a sense of how things look and feel here, and now you can see a little further ahead. And like this we keep moving forward. How long it takes to get to where you want to be, to feel how you want to feel, depends on a lot of things of course. The main thing for most people is just getting unstuck and moving in the right direction.
— Maya Angelou
When concern, anticipation and planning - which are supposed to function to protect you and the things you care about - turn against you and morph into chronic worry or anxiety, it’s as if your trusted bodyguard has turned into a relentless bully. The inner voice that is supposed to help you cope with life’s uncertainties and dangers browbeats you into feeling more threatened and insecure. The more powerless you feel, the more you worry; the more you worry, the more powerless you feel. It might be specific worries or a general sense of anxiety - either way, it’s exhausting.
Maybe it’s one or two big things or maybe it’s just everything, but you know it’s all getting to be too much by the way it’s wearing you down. You’re not your best self. Everybody knows that stress affects sleep, appetite, energy, concentration, sex drive and so on. But the things that nobody talks about can really be the worst of it: feelings of shame, inadequacy, loneliness and fear. The strain of wearing a mask that tells the world you’re fine when in reality you’re not. And feeling like there’s no end in sight.
Regret, rumination and self-criticism tend to be repetitive, to loop, and to loop you in. You keep telling yourself what you already know about your problems, going over the same old ground, as if retracing your steps over and over again will suddenly reveal the way out. In actuality, you’re digging yourself in deeper, getting more stuck with every negative thought you think, with every harsh thing you say to yourself. Finally, the sense that you’re spinning your wheels generates yet another layer of pain, with feelings of frustration and helplessness adding to the weight of what’s stuck.
Restlessness doesn’t necessarily mean you’re anxious and a funk doesn’t have to mean you’re depressed. Sometimes these feelings are messengers, letting you know that you’re needing something new or something more in your life and relationships. Maybe you’re locked into decisions you made a long time ago or maybe there are changes you keep putting off or don’t know how to make. How it shows up isn’t the real problem. The problem is ignoring or not knowing what to do with a yearning that’s real.
Avoidance reinforces anxiety. Withdrawal and distraction feed depression. The kinds of things our moods make us feel like doing are often the exact opposite of what will in fact help us feel better. One way of getting unstuck is to figure out, systematically, which activities, done with whom, make us feel worse, which better, and how to refrain from the former and to consistently cultivate the latter. What you do matters.
Emotions - including painful ones like sadness, loneliness, insecurity, shame, fear and frustration - are a natural part of life. But when they get stuck and stop changing, get too big and overwhelming or too remote and inaccessible, then there’s a problem. Emotion focused therapy helps in getting back in touch with what is natural and healthy in our emotions - even if they are painful. Emotions provide the map that serves to guide us, step by step, to the other side of the pain.
Negative thinking can be so glaring and repetitive that it’s like being held prisoner on a merry-go-round. Or so fleeting and indistinct that it’s hard to catch and put into words. Either way, if you’re mostly thinking about what’s bad, you’re not likely going to be feeling good. Cognitive therapy provides the tools for becoming aware of distorted thinking and for bringing things back into balance.
The Buddha’s teachings coalesced around a central insight: we are constantly reacting to our feelings. If they feel good, we want more and we don’t want things to change. If they feel bad, we want less and things can’t change fast enough. We’re so intent on creating the conditions for feeling good or escaping situations that feel bad, we never develop the one skill that will allow us to feel alright no matter what’s happening: the skill of relating wisely to what’s here, the skill of mindfulness.
Each of these approaches can be used independently as a stand-alone modality, or they can be integrated or implemented sequentially. Once we’ve identified your goals, I’ll help guide you into a process that makes sense to you, that takes into account your values and your strengths, and that we formulate collaboratively. The next step is to get in touch and set up a brief phone chat.