Individual Psychotherapy

The first line of Tolstoy's Anna Karenin goes like this, "Happy families are all alike; unhappy families are all unhappy in their own ways." Like Tolstoy's families, people who come to therapy come for their unique reasons. One may be uncertain about a relationship or have difficulties with relationships in general, another may feel depressed, or anxious, or abuse substances, or just feel incomplete, or like a fraud. Others repeat uncomfortable patterns in their lives. Something may feel unspoken, unnoticed, elusive.

My aim is to provide a safe, warm, intelligent place from which to range freely through one's life, a "secure base" that opens the way for curiosity not just about the painful things, but about the joyful ones too. Therapy helps in so far as it allows for unique, seemingly unshareable experiences to be shared -- for the unspoken to be spoken. At the same time, by providing an ideal teller-listener environment, or as close as one can get to it, therapy sheds light on earlier teller-listener relationships, such as between child and parent, allowing for new ways of looking at things and new ways of telling and deciding.