Here are some of the basic beliefs that inform my work:
- Therapy is a challenging journey that can be frightening to undertake, but which holds great promise for personal growth and living a more meaningful and fulfilling life.
- Clients should feel safe and have a sense that their therapist has genuine interest in and care for them.
- Therapy should be a collaborative, egalitarian exploration of both the client’s history and the here and now experience.
- The human organism orients toward health, sociability and equilibrium. Similar to a midwife, a skillful therapist helps facilitates the process of healing.
- Therapy is not just about analyzing and talking. Emotions manifest in the body, as well as in the psyche, therefore effective therapy attends to the client’s somatic experience as well as his/her story.
- Symptoms point toward something in the psyche that needs attending.
- Within all of us is a “tender soft spot” (some refer to this as an inner child) which has been wounded, and needs our acceptance and attention for us to become whole.
- While medications can be very helpful to take the edge off of some symptoms, true healing comes when we turn toward, not away from, our suffering.
- Trauma is defined by an “experience that overwhelms your ability to cope”. Most trauma happens in relationship and the effects of trauma can only be healed in relationship.
- Shame is an inevitable outcome of trauma, abuse or neglect, and shame undermines our basic self worth, making healing very difficult. One of the most important goals of therapy for many clients is to heal shame.
My work is informed by several schools of psychotherapy. Here is a brief description of each.
My graduate degree has an emphasis on Depth Psychology, which means that I have an interest in the unconscious of my clients. The unconscious mind expresses itself through dreams, waking images, experiences in the body, symptoms, gestures, and a myriad of other ways. As I sit with clients, I am attending to their unconscious expressions as much as their conscious speech.
Object Relations (a somewhat unfortunate term) is a branch of depth psychology based on the ideas of Melanie Klein. This theory proposes that adult relationships are based on a template set in infancy and childhood. In my work with clients, we work to understand how their early relationships have left an imprint that carries into their current relationships, including our therapeutic relationship. When a client becomes conscious of how childhood dynamics are recreated in the here and now of the therapeutic relationship, there is an opportunity to change those dynamics and experience healthier, more fulfilling styles of relating.
Self Relations is a field of therapy founded by Stephen Gilligan. In Self Relations work, the therapist continually orients toward the “tender soft spot” in the client, and helps the client develop a positive internal relationship between the competent adult self and that soft spot (which can be likened to the client’s child self). I have found this type of work to be extremely beneficial for clients who suffer from chronic shame, low self-esteem, or anxiety.
Somatic Psychotherapy is a branch of therapy that tends to the body as well as the psyche. Even 100 years ago, Freud knew that a client could not experience a reduction in symptoms just by intellectually understanding his interpretations, but that the client needed to have an emotional, or “embodied” experience of this understanding in order to heal. I feel strongly that talk therapy cannot ignore the importance of the body. I am trained in techniques to help my clients become more aware of their bodily sensations and emotions. I also use somatic methods to help clients become grounded when they are feeling anxious, scared or out of control. I use them to help stir up feelings when the client is feeling flat, dull or dissociated. And I use them to help clients feel empowered, calm, confident or optimistic.
Trauma Work When most of us hear the word “trauma”, we imagine war veterans or victims of assault or rape. New research offers new ways of defining trauma which make it much broader. Most, if not all, of us have experienced some level of trauma, whether it was acute (such as combat or rape) or diffuse, such as an ongoing childhood molestation, or being teased frequently at school. Some trauma is so subtle that clients don’t even realized they suffered until therapy helps them make connections between their current symptoms and childhood experiences (for example, having a parent who was self-absorbed).
Attachment Theory is concerned with the degree to which human beings feel connected, safe or comforted by other human beings. Trauma affects our ability to attach to caregivers, and later to partners or even friends. Through the therapeutic relationship, the client’s attachment patterns are repeated with the therapist, which gives them an opportunity to work through the fears, frustrations and obstacles which hinder him/her from feeling securely connected to others.
