“Most of us spend our lives protecting ourselves from losses that have already happened.” Geneen Roth

My vision

I see the work of psychotherapy as a journey that is foremost internal. And, from my perspective and understanding, it asks you

• to look inside, and then to travel and explore the inner landscapes of yourself,

• to begin to discover what has long been there and waits for your return,

• to recognize and accept yourself for who you are so that you can now free yourself of the long-held and limiting beliefs,

• and to allow the images that keep you trapped in the old stories and patterns to evolve, to transform.

Then you can begin to move forward, to make the changes you want and need to make in order to transform yourself and your life.

Safety, trust, and collaboration

The heart of our work together is building a connection of safety and trust to ensure that the work is successful and that your unique journey is fulfilled. From there we work collaboratively, meeting you where you are at present in order for us to determine the approach that best supports your needs and strengths.

The purpose of psychotherapy is for you to come to a better understanding of yourself and your life situations. More importantly, to regain the trust in yourself that you were born with.

Little by little, through patience and repeated effort, the mind will become stilled in the Self. The Bhagavad Gita

This self-awareness and self-understanding can then move you toward clarifying what changes you may want to make in yourself and in your life in order to live your fullest potential.

Look at the real nature of the harm that is done to you. It is as elusive as a drawing on water. Let your resentment subside by itself. When the stormy waves of thoughts have vanished, the mind becomes like the cloudless sky that has nothing to win or lose. SHECHEN GYALTSAP (1871-1926)

My background and specialties

• Internal Family Systems (IFS)
• Enneagram
• Cognitive Behavioral
• Mindfulness-Based
• Somatic-Based
• Transpersonal & Psycho-spiritual
• Psychosynthesis
• Dialectical-Behavioral Therapy
• Interpersonal
• Psychodynamic

I work with such identified concerns and issues as:

• Depression, anxiety, and other mood and emotional challenges.
• Trauma and abuse history, domestic violence
• Death, dying, grief, bereavement, and loss
• Relationship concerns, interpersonal communication, and conflict resolution
• Self-esteem, meaning and purpose in life
• Spiritual and/or religious development
• Creativity
• Personality and Identity issues
• Stress reduction
• Family dynamics
• Life transitions
• Acute and chronic illnesses

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
~Rainer Maria Rilke

Out of my personal and professional background I have developed an approach that is both holistic and transformational.

Moving towards a state of harmony with a holistic approach

Psychotherapy addresses the task of individuation and integration, and moves us toward a state of harmony. This comes out of knowing ourselves first. This is a major task in psychotherapy.

A holistic approach holds that a person is more than their diagnosis and that:

• psychological health includes the various aspects of body, mind, emotions, & spirit,

• overall well-being includes the relational, spiritual, social, cultural, familial, historical, natural, and environmental areas of their life.

• personality is also made up of parts that have evolved over their lifetime in response to concerns in their life that is naturally a part of development. To be whole is to integrate and work with these parts.

• you are free to choose traditional and/or non-traditional approaches to health and well-being: psychiatric medications and medical procedures; and a choice to be medication-free, choosing alternative and integrative approaches, such as homeopathy, naturopathy, chiropractics, acupuncture, herbal, body-oriented health approaches.

A collaborative relationship with other practitioners, traditional or non-traditional, involved in the client’s life is a more inclusive approach to working with others. The therapist is part of the therapeutic process and is involved in his/her own personal and professional inquiry and growth.

Reaching your limit, a threshold for yourself, can be a gateway to a major transformation

Psychotherapy is not easy. It is challenging, difficult, and, at times, unbearable. It requires that we look inside of ourselves and from that inner place make the changes we need to make. It asks us to look at the relationship between our past and our present. Only in doing that can we come to the threshold that leads us into our future.

Most people enter therapy when they have reached their limit, or some limit in their life and they feel they cannot go any further, or take it any longer, whatever that may be. It is reaching this limit that is, at the same time, reaching the threshold that we are being asked to face and cross over. The limits we reach are the very same limits that confine us and keep us trapped in the same patterns. This is the challenge of therapy, the difficult task in therapy. It is at this point that we also stand at the threshold of a major transformation.

A transformational approach holds that:

• we each have an innate intelligence and presence (the self) within us,

• self moves us, always, toward wholeness, healing and transformation,

• we develop from a pre-personal stage, into a personal stage, and finally evolve into a transpersonal stage of human growth.

• the drive in our lives is to transform who we are and thereby transform our lives in such a way to best support who we truly are and what we truly need in the present to achieve further transformation.

“Where something becomes extremely difficult and unbearable,
there we also stand already quite near its transformation.” Rainer Maria Rilke