MY APPROACH

 

I work with individuals and couples using a collaborative style, informed by various approaches.  For one, as a necessary but not sufficient starting point, I know it is important that you feel both comfortable and safe, to discover some hope in early sessions and to believe you are in competent hands. This is accomplished through getting to know my style, connecting in early sessions, sharing yourself and getting input, asking questions, and giving feedback.

 

In addition to creating this positive working relationship, my approach emphasizes gaining connection to yourself – attaining a greater awareness of your feelings, experiences, thoughts, and guiding fears and motivations.  Often these things are just below the surface, or hidden due to fears, lack of skill or familiarity, or blocked out by other demands, stresses and responsibilities.   As well, this lack of awareness of and understanding of our experiences, feelings, and thought style can often lead to problems in living – relationship issues, depression, anxiety, and other forms of distress.  Therapy is a unique and sometimes magical place where you are allowed to drop away from habitual patterns of everyday to peer at yourself anew – to regain or even claim for the first time a sense of connection and knowing. 

 

In achieving this goal, I employ a variety of interventions – mindfulness (e.g. paying attention to immediate experience), insight and awareness development through exploration of relationships and historical patterns, emotional skill building and coping skill building (including self-monitoring skills, communication, conflict management), and when desired, guided visualizations and imagery to deepen self-understanding.   My goal is to help you feel more open towards yourself, more understanding, more compassionate and more effective.  Implicit in this, also, is that you feel less distressed and burdened by life and its many internal and external challenges.  

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• IFS (Internal Family Systems) LEVEL 1 trained

• MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction) trained