Individual
Psychotherapy
We can think of a person as organized into three parts: thoughts, feelings, and behavior. A person seeks counseling when they experience some level of distress in these areas, and find they need some help in sorting out their distress; where it comes from; tools to work their way through it; and a pathway to healthier functioning. All three of these--thoughts, feelings, and behavior--are all involved. Different therapeutic approaches identify one of the these as the area of primary focus. Behavioral therapists obviously focus on developing healthier patterns of behavior. Cognitive therapists will focus on thoughts, and beliefs that shape behavior. Psychodynamic therapists focus on the feelings and experience of the person, the ways in which relationships and life experiences have shaped the emotional experience of the person, and how some of these feelings and experiences might be alive and powerful even though they are in the unconscious.
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I work primarily from the psychodynamic approach, and there are a couple of reason for that. One, it is just naturally where my interest lies. It is the domain where intuition, empathy, compassion, sadness, joy, surprise (the list is goes on!) brings the richness of life most profoundly into focus. Secondly, current technologies of real-time brain imaging support the view that we are actually guided in what we do, what we believe, and how we act largely by what we feel. Johnathon Haidt, social psychologist, describes the relationship of emotions to rational thought as an elephant (feelings) with a rider (cognition). Logic and rational evaluation can help strategize, rationalize, and fine tune choices, but the elephant (the emotions) is going to go where it will.
My therapeutic engagement is interpersonal, authentically present, collaborative, and relational. It is a wonderfully rich experience for me. (I'm a lucky man to do what I do!) The psychological lense that I look through is greatly influenced by a relational psychoanalytic/psychotherapeutic perspective, attachment theory, an understanding of how the various degrees of trauma can shape and interfere with our life, and while understanding can be pursed by one's self; healing rarely happens in isolation