Individual Therapy

Working primarily with adults (with special exceptions) I approach therapy with the bedrock assumption that it is the therapeutic relationship itself that is most essential to healing.  Why?  We are, above all, relational beings:  Our lives, our brains, and our deepest needs and wishes — and their painful denial — all revolve around our life relationships from Day One.  So it only makes sense that we heal in that context, as well, achieving the corrective emotional experience often long missing.  Sometimes it’s as simple as being truly heard by me as an individual; for others, group work (below) offers relationship of another kind with profound benefit; for still others, improving their connection with their primary partner make life more livable.  So we start here.

Research in the world of psychotherapy has proven that within that relationship, some routes are simply more efficient than others.  Two techniques I find particularly helpful are Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and Brainspotting (BSP). These are considered “neurobiological techniques” and use recent insights into how the brain holds and processes painful events to dramatically increase the speed and depth of resolution for PTSD and less overt trauma.  I am amazed at least weekly at what is possible in even a single session of this work.

Woven in with this cutting-edge technology, I also (internally) rely on my training as a Practitioner of Medical Qigong, a traditional Chinese way of understanding physical and psychological health, to better understand what I’m hearing.  I am constantly surprised by the value of this ancient perspective.  Perhaps the way the perspective of a second eye allows depth perception, something about this wholly different point of view can simply help things pop.