My Approach
I don’t believe there is one kind of therapy that fits every person, every problem, or every moment in a person’s life.
Human beings are complex. We have histories, bodies, relationships, thoughts, emotions, different parts of ourselves, developmental needs, cultural contexts, and our individual questions of meaning and purpose. At different times, different dimensions of our experience may need attention.
I sometimes think of this as an integral approach to therapy: trying to understand enough of the whole person to know which perspective may be most useful at a particular time.
Different maps illuminate different dimensions of being human. The goal is not to fit a person into a theory, but to understand the person well enough to know which map may help us see more clearly.
Relationship is part of the medicine
At the center of my work is the therapeutic relationship itself.
Therapy is not simply one person applying techniques to another. It is also a real relationship, with appropriate professional boundaries, in which we can feel safe, known, challenged, supported, frustrated, understood, misunderstood, and sometimes repaired.
Feeling genuinely known and accepted can make it safer to look honestly at ourselves.
When difficult feelings or parts of ourselves no longer have to be held entirely alone, they can become easier to approach. Another person’s steady presence can help us stay grounded enough to remain with experiences that may previously have felt too painful, frightening, or overwhelming.
The relationship can also become a place where familiar patterns begin to show themselves. How we seek closeness, protect ourselves, respond to disappointment, accommodate others, withdraw, become defensive, or manage differences may sometimes emerge between therapist and client.
When that happens, therapy offers an opportunity not only to talk about those patterns, but to understand and work with them as they are happening.
Defenses developed for a reason
I do not see defenses simply as obstacles that need to be broken through.
Most of the ways we protect ourselves developed because, at some point, they served an important purpose.
Avoidance may have protected us from being overwhelmed. Intellectualizing may have helped us create order in a confusing emotional world. Pleasing others may have helped preserve connection. Withdrawal may have provided safety. Anger may have protected something more vulnerable underneath.
Good therapy respects these adaptations.
There are times when someone needs challenge and times when what is most helpful is greater support. A person who feels grounded, resourced, and secure may be ready to look directly at something difficult. The same person, during a period of tremendous stress or vulnerability, may need more holding and stabilization.
My aim is not to strip away defenses before a person has something stronger and more flexible to stand on.
As safety, self-awareness, and a more solid core sense of self develop, defenses often begin to soften because they are no longer carrying the same burden they once did.
Attention opens the door to awareness
An important part of my work involves helping people develop the capacity to direct and sustain attention.
This is one of the ways mindfulness enters therapy, although it does not always look like formal meditation.
When we intentionally turn attention toward our experience, we become more able to notice what is actually happening: a thought, an emotion, a tightening in the body, an impulse to withdraw, a critical voice, a fear of being rejected, or a part of ourselves trying desperately to keep us safe.
Attention invites awareness.
And awareness creates the possibility of relationship.
If we cannot see something happening within us, we are much more likely to be driven by it automatically. Once we can recognize it, we can begin to become curious about it, listen to it, understand its function, and choose how we want to respond.
I sometimes use a simple phrase with clients:
See it to free it. Feel it to heal it.
“Seeing” involves developing enough perspective to recognize what is happening rather than simply being immersed in it.
“Feeling” involves developing enough capacity to stay with the underlying experience rather than immediately turning away from it, suppressing it, or becoming overwhelmed by it.
Both matter.
Developing the witness
One of the capacities I hope therapy strengthens is the ability to experience ourselves while also observing ourselves.
We need to be able to enter the river of our experience. To feel our feelings, inhabit our bodies, recognize our longings, and allow ourselves to be affected by life.
But we also benefit from being able to stand, at least partly, on the riverbank and notice what is happening.
Without enough contact with experience, we can become rigid, overly intellectualized, or disconnected.
Without enough perspective, we can become flooded, reactive, or completely identified with whatever we are feeling in the moment.
The ability to move between these positions creates greater flexibility.
Different traditions use different language for this capacity. Mindfulness speaks of awareness. Developmental psychology often describes a shift from simply being inside an experience to being able to observe and reflect on it. Parts-oriented approaches speak about a core Self that can relate to different parts. Contemplative traditions may refer to the witness.
The language matters less to me than the capacity itself.
We can increasingly experience a thought, feeling, fear, role, or part of ourselves without believing that it represents the entirety of who we are.
That creates room for choice.
Developing a different relationship with our parts
Our inner lives are often more complex than they first appear. Different parts of us can hold different needs, beliefs, fears, and agendas.
One part may want intimacy while another is terrified of dependence. One may want to leave a relationship while another desperately wants to preserve it. One part may demand achievement while another is exhausted. One may be highly self-critical in an effort to prevent failure, while another carries shame or vulnerability underneath.
Rather than deciding that one part is good and another is bad, I am interested in understanding the larger system.
- What is each part trying to accomplish?
- What is it protecting?
- When did it learn that this role was necessary?
- What might it need in order to loosen its grip?
As we develop a stronger observing and integrating center, different parts of ourselves can become less polarized. Instead of one part taking over while another is pushed away, there is greater possibility of holding multiple truths within a larger whole.
The body is part of the story
Psychological experience does not happen only in the mind.
Our bodies often register threat, grief, shame, anger, longing, and connection before we have words for what is happening.
A tightening in the chest, a clenched stomach, shallow breathing, numbness, agitation, or an impulse to move toward or away from someone can all carry information.
Paying attention to the body can help us recognize experiences that may not yet be available through thought alone.
It can also help us understand when the nervous system is moving toward overwhelm or shutdown and develop greater capacity to regulate ourselves.
This does not mean every experience has to be analyzed through the body. It means the body is another source of information, another map that can be useful.
Practical tools matter too
Depth and relational work do not replace practical skills.
Sometimes the most helpful intervention is very concrete.
We may need ways to regulate intense emotion, challenge an unhelpful thought, change a behavior, improve sleep, communicate more effectively, tolerate distress, or interrupt a pattern that keeps reinforcing itself.
I regularly draw from cognitive-behavioral and dialectical-behavioral approaches when these tools can help.
For me, the question is not whether therapy should be “depth” or “skills based.”
Often we need both.
Practical tools can provide stability and immediate relief while deeper work helps us understand why the pattern exists and what may allow more lasting change.
We exist in systems
I also believe it is important to understand people systemically.
None of us develops in isolation.
We are shaped by families, intimate relationships, communities, cultures, institutions, and the larger environments in which we live.
There are also systems within us: different parts, needs, emotions, beliefs, and protective strategies that interact with one another.
Therapy may therefore move between the individual and the larger relational field.
Sometimes the question is, “What’s happening inside me?”
Sometimes it’s, “What happens between us?”
Sometimes it’s, “What larger family, cultural, or relational system is influencing what’s happening here?”
Seeing these different levels can help us understand problems that otherwise appear to exist only inside an individual person.
Development continues throughout life
I believe human development continues across the lifespan.
We do not reach adulthood and become psychologically finished.
Life continues to confront us with experiences that ask us to grow: independence, intimacy, partnership, parenting, loss, responsibility, midlife, illness, aging, mortality, and questions of meaning.
Sometimes psychological symptoms are primarily symptoms and need direct treatment.
But sometimes suffering also signals that an older way of organizing our lives no longer fits.
A strategy, identity, relationship pattern, or worldview that once worked may have become too small for the life we are now trying to live.
Therapy can help reduce some of the interference that blocks development and support greater differentiation, integration, flexibility, perspective, and capacity for intimacy.
Growth is about becoming increasingly able to hold complexity, reflect on ourselves, take in new information, remain open to perspectives beyond our own, and balance our needs with the needs of other people.
A stronger self can become a more open self
There is a paradox here that I find important.
When our sense of self is fragile, we may need to defend it rigidly. New information can feel threatening. A mistake can feel like evidence that we are fundamentally flawed. Another person’s perspective can feel like an attack.
As a more secure core sense of self develops, there can be less need for this rigidity.
We become better able to say:
I may be wrong.
There may be another way of seeing this.
I can acknowledge my impact without believing I am a bad person.
I can listen to another person’s experience without abandoning my own.
In this way, greater inner solidity can create greater openness.
The goal is not a perfectly defended self, but a self secure enough that it can continue learning, changing, and relating.
Meaning and the larger questions matter
Not every psychological struggle can be reduced to a symptom.
People also wrestle with questions such as:
- Who am I becoming?
- What matters to me now?
- How do I want to live?
- What gives my life meaning?
- How do I live with uncertainty, loss, aging, or mortality?
- What is my relationship to something larger than myself?
For some people, these questions are explicitly spiritual. For others, they are entirely secular.
I do not approach therapy with a particular spiritual or religious agenda.
But when questions of meaning, transcendence, spiritual experience, or spiritual crisis are important to someone, I believe they deserve to be taken seriously as part of the person’s psychological life.
Toward greater integration
Ultimately, much of my work is about integration.
Integration does not mean eliminating difference or conflict.
It means helping the different dimensions of ourselves become more differentiated and better connected.
Thought and feeling.
Mind and body.
Autonomy and connection.
Strength and vulnerability.
Different parts of ourselves.
Our individual needs and our participation in relationships and communities larger than ourselves.
As these dimensions become more integrated, we often gain greater freedom to respond rather than simply react.
The aim of therapy is not perfection.
It is greater capacity to know ourselves more honestly, regulate ourselves more effectively, relate more deeply, tolerate greater complexity, remain open to growth, and participate more fully in the life we are living.
Beginning Therapy
If this way of thinking about therapy resonates with you, you are welcome to contact me and tell me a little about what brings you in.
We can begin to consider what may be getting in the way, what kind of work might be most helpful, and whether my approach feels like a good fit for what you are looking for.