Treatment Approach

I like to approach therapy as collaborative detective work, solving the riddles that stand in the way of a happier, calmer, more meaningful life. What are the current issues and past experiences contributing to your distress? How can you attain greater awareness and control over your decisions and behavior? What are the earlier plot points in the story of your life that set it on a course you'd like to correct? These are the puzzles we'll undertake solving together. Research indicates that the connection between you and your therapist is the paramount factor in predicting therapeutic success. I'm not a passive listener; I provide ample feedback and will approach our work together with respect, curiosity and compassion.

I think about patients from a psychodynamic perspective, and I make liberal use of both psychodynamic and cognitive-behavioral techniques.  In plain English?  In all therapeutic endeavors, I try to maintain a balance between exploring early contributors to current troubles on the one hand -- and, on the other, focusing on present-day patterns that maintain or exacerbate them.  I work from the premise that our choices and behavior often have unconscious motivations and unarticulated assumptions.  I'm interested in making those processes more conscious, so you have more awareness and control over your decisions and actions. Difficult moments in therapy, whether due to the subject matter of our talks or to the nature of our interaction, are usually blessings in disguise-- they are often clues that we can examine for their relevance to your current ordeals. 

When warranted, I may also incorporate some aspects of dialectical behavior therapy (DBT).  While DBT is not a mainstay of my practice, I nonetheless draw upon key features of that modality (mindfulness, behavior chain analyses, distress tolerance and interpersonal effectiveness skills) when I think it will be helpful for patients struggling with emotional volatility and interpersonal turmoil.  (If you are in fact looking primarily for DBT, I'll gladly refer you to clinicians who have more extensive expertise in that modality.)