individual therapy
Part of the work of therapy is unraveling the preconceptions, fears and concerns you bring to relationships in general, not just to your therapeutic relationship with me. It doesn’t always feel good to open up and I am respectful that each person needs to reveal what they wish in their own time. If being vulnerable, dependent or needy feels difficult or uncomfortable for you, we will explore the reasons behind the feeling. We’ll want to look at how you learned to survive as a child whenever you didn’t get what you needed, when instead of being seen, heard and supported, you were let down, not met, left without support or deeply disappointed. These are very good reasons for not feeling safe as a child and the feelings may linger into adulthood. You may want to explore these areas with me in therapy.
Some areas you may want to explore in therapy could be the challenges in your relationships, difficulties on the job, or your growth in creative,spiritual or other ways. The kind of therapy I practice is not about providing answers or giving you advice, but exploring with you to find your own answers. Giving you the time to explore your thoughts and feelings without rushing to find a solution is something you deserve, because if the solution were easy you would probably have come to it already on your own. The uniqueness of the therapist-client relationship is that it is a place where all of you is welcome, where you can show me the many roles that you play out in the world without worrying that they may be contradictory. As you find safety in our relationship, it will become easier to reveal who you are in therapy and to others.
I work psycho-dynamically and so will be interested in what you talk about as well as what is excluded, what is not said. This focus recognizes the importance of the unconscious. At bottom, the unconscious is what you do not know about yourself. To not know things about yourself maintains those things as they are, undisrupted. The space created by regular and protected meetings between therapist and client is an environment where the movements of the unconscious can be observed and nursed forward with support, into consciousness. I will encourage you to try to pay attention to your dreams, and if your dreams turn out to be important to you, they can become one focus of our work together.
Our habitual ways of being in the world were formed in order to protect us when we didn’t yet have the resources for more adult, creative responses. Now, we often cause ourselves more pain by hiding the sources of our behavior than we would by trying to understand those sources and discovering what our potential can be as adults. If you’d like to work on developing more resources to bring to your life, individual therapy is a good place to start.