You don’t need to have the right words before you come in. You don’t have to perform. You don’t have to convince me your struggles are bad enough.
William Miller, the co-founder of motivational interviewing, describes a therapist’s role as a guide, and I share that exact belief. A guide does not fully lead and does not fully follow. Instead, they do a little of both. Think of a travel guide. They aren’t just going to follow you around, right? But you also wouldn’t want a guide to boss you around, telling you what you want to see and making assumptions about what you’ll enjoy. A good guide will listen to you, find out where you want to go, what you’re interested in, and what you’re hoping for on the journey and then draw on their own expertise to get you there, safely and efficiently. Therapy with me is similar. I will not solely follow or direct you. I will guide you. This will require your expertise just as much as mine.
You know a lot about yourself, and I'm a life-long student of mental health. This means we are both bringing something valuable to the table when we do this work.
Pain is an inevitable part of life. My job is not to make my clients’ pain magically vanish. One of my favorite things to tell people about therapy is this: The point of therapy is not to make you feel better. The point of therapy is to make you better at feeling. In other words, therapy will not completely eliminate your pain no matter how well you understand it. What therapy will do is give you the tools to make your pain more manageable and meaningful. When pain does inevitably show up, you will learn how to make space for it without being overtaken by it. Therapy has the power to make a life with pain worth living.
I am a firm believer that healing means shifting from survival to choice.
We all grew up in imperfect environments with imperfect caregivers and to some degree we each had to adapt to our unique circumstances in order to survive. In this context, “survive” can mean changing who you are to fit into your family, doing whatever it takes to avoid conflict, neglect or abuse, or trying to get your basic attachment needs met – think love, connection, acceptance, attention, safety, etc.
This adaptation can look countless different ways. One very common example is sacrificing one’s own needs, boundaries, and well-being in order to keep the peace or manage another person’s volatile emotions. These adaptive behaviors served a very important function when you were young: they kept you safe, and hopefully (albeit conditionally), loved. But these same adaptations often lead to lots of problems in adulthood, such as chronic people-pleasing, overworking, low self-worth, confusion around personal identity, and difficulty setting boundaries, just to name a few.
When you begin to heal, you move away from these learned responses and shift toward more intentional choices and authentic behaviors.
Reconnect with yourself and rewrite the stories written by family dysfunction.
When you work with me, you will:
Uncover how and why you adapted as a child, and identify how you perpetuate these patterns today.
Explore how these old habits both serve and disrupt your current life, career, and relationships.
Develop deep compassion and gratitude for the younger version of yourself who used these tools to survive.
Grieve what you didn’t receive in your youth and learn how to directly meet those needs today.
Use newfound wisdom to override old conditioning, enabling you to choose differently and transform your life, work, and relationships