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Therapy can help you make the emotional and relationship changes you want
toward:
- reducing emotional and relationship distress;
- and living a more fulfilling life.
You can expect to experience a "Person Centered" approach to psychotherapy
in working with me.
You can expect a climate which enables you to tap into your own resources for
finding the answers within yourself to your issues in living. Key aspects of the
growth promoting climate, which you can experience in working with me, are ...
- empathic understanding: empathic
attunement to your feelings and personal meanings, feeling with you,
giving you the room to find your own way;
- respect, caring, acceptance: being accepted in
a total rather than a conditional or possessive way, making your
therapeutic movement more likely;
- genuineness, realness, congruence:
experiencing no professional front or clinical facade but instead a
transparent warm, compassionate, supportive humanity which you can
trust and which encourages you to be more in touch with and true to your own experiencing.
Such a climate of acceptance and understanding can enable you to become more
caring toward yourself, to listen to your own inner experiencing, to find new
courses of action that are right for you, thus becoming a more genuine whole
person. You can change by making use of the therapeutic relationship itself.
"Therapists set the stage and serve as assistants who provide the conditions
under which this magic (healing powers of the client) can operate (p.95). ...
Therapists who establish a climate of trust and relative safety through empathy,
attentive listening, appropriate and contextual responsiveness, communication of
understanding, respect and care are facilitating the client's use of ... therapy
to change. ... Clients generally do not change in therapy because of the
therapist's theoretical orientation, but by making use of his/her own resources
(40%) and the resources of the therapist (30%)."1
You would find working with me to be emotionally focused. We would go beyond talking about your feelings to
deepen your in-session direct experiencing of what is stirring in
you. You would place your attention in your emotional truths and
experience them -- being in it and speaking from it, not about
it. New meanings can emerge from your experiencing,
enabling you to reprocess your emotional realities and choose new courses of action.
More information on the Person Centered approach can be found at the website
of The Association for the Development of the Person
Centered Approach.
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Specific procedures I may offer when they can help meet your needs are
primarily ways of prompting you to turn on your own native capacities for
accessing and changing your emotional realities. These procedures include
...
- Focusing
Oriented Psychotherapy
-
Focusing is a gentle process of self-exploration and self-discovery
that lets you tap into what’s stirring inside you, beneath your conscious
awareness, beyond intellect and logical thinking, letting you get to know
that “deeper you” so you can make positive changes in your life. You learn
to turn your attention inward to the bodily felt sense about your
struggle. Many
therapy approaches emphasize getting in touch with what's going on inside
you. Focusing can show you how to do it -- productively!
- EMDR: Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing
-
I have found this procedure very helpful in accelerating the
processing of painful material. EMDR could help you get unstuck from
terrifying traumatic memories as well as from other painful memories,
negative beliefs about yourself and emotional distress that have been
limiting your life — and pretty quickly to boot.
EMDR can also be very helpful in strengthening the resources you already
have and applying them to your present challenges.
- Couple Therapy
-
The fundamental procedure I would guide a couple in is the Couples
Dialogue. The goal is constructive conflict resolution so you can move from
frustrating each others needs toward meeting each others needs. This is a
structured communication approach in which you learn to: a) constructively
express your issues, both at surface levels as well as at the level of
underlying wounds; and b) as listener, empathically understand your partner.
- Relating Without
Violence
-
Psychotherapy groups for domestically violent male incarcerates.
Focusing, EMDR and Dialoguing procedures are integrated to provide the men
with
- Therapy for Emotional Change, and
- Therapy for Relationship Change
-
- Stress Management
- From time to time, you will be offered procedures for helping you in
calming yourself, reducing anxiety, soothing after heavy emotional work,
quieting your racing thoughts, and becoming more fully present in the
moment.
1Review
of "The heart and soul of change: What works in therapy" by Ryan Lamothe, M.D.
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Toronto Psychologist