Welcome to my website. You’re probably here because you’re wanting to make a change in your life, to achieve more satisfaction, more comfort, more meaning, either in regard to your relationships or to your Self. Or both. Or maybe you suffer from depression or anxiety and it just sucks. I’m probably here because I want to share with you what I might know about how to feel better.
When I ask myself what is most unique about the psychotherapy experience, I’d have to say it’s the experience of “being heard.” Not just being heard like sounds waves bouncing around the space, but really being heard. Heard with interest. Heard underneath the content of what we’re saying. We want our hearts to be heard.
I believe that we actually heal ourselves, if only we can be present in the right medium. Like bacteria in agar-agar, if you took high school biology. And if you didn’t, sorry about that reference. Here’s how it works, or how I think it works. Because there are thousands of books and articles written on how therapy works, many of them contradicting each other and perhaps claiming to have better, quicker results than the other methods. The one element in psychotherapy that just keeps coming up as the number one, and perhaps even the only, element that produces lasting change, is the quality of the Therapy Relationship. Being heard, feeling understood. This in itself has certain powerful healing properties.
So here’s how I think it works. (I’ll spare you my credentials, but say that my opinion is based on years of study with psychoanalysts and others in various modes of treatment, and years of practice with some of my favorite people: my clients.) So the person or couple comes in to my office, bearing the weight of a jumble of uncomfortable feelings and needs, and often self-defeating behaviors as well. These behaviors didn’t just appear, but instead have meaning. We often speak our pain through our actions, our relationship choices, our repeated dead-ends.
The therapist is able to help the person/couple put their wants into words in a clear and direct manner, through attuned listening. The unique ways that we may be stopping ourselves from getting these needs met are slowly revealed. The reasons we do this to ourselves actually serves a particular survival function in childhood. The relief we feel when we discover that our feelings and behaviors aren’t weird or crazy is immense. We feel normalized, validated. We realize that the behaviors or attitudes that helped us very much in childhood- helped us to survive, really, just aren’t very helpful to us now. This insight is in itself healing. Often it releases the trapped energy that had been spent in cringing in fear and shaming ourselves with self-judgment; the energy becomes available to make changes, and people do make changes.
It is tremendously helpful, for instance, to be able to turn to one’s spouse and say, “Woops, I realize I was snappy just then. I guess when you came home a half hour late tonight, I got scared, ’cause of my dad having cheated on my mom.” And it is wonderful to hear a response like “Thank you. I wonder if my not texting you to let you know I was going to be late (cause I ran into my old middle-school teacher) was partly cause I’m practicing being independent and not needy, but, hmmm…I might have created neediness in you that I could judge, instead of judging the neediness in me!” Can you see your spouse talking like that? Haha! Maybe not, cause I’m trying to distill in one sentence what it might have taken a couple a looong time to get to. And in real life people don’t talk like therapy robots! But these types of self-aware interactions often do become possible as a result of couples’ counseling. Marriage is a wacky place. We often actually unconsciously pick someone to carry unwanted parts of the self, and then pick on them for those parts. Wacky, as I said! Why? Because we are human. We are not perfect- far from it. Embracing and appreciating our imperfections is so much more comfortable than denying them, defending against them the way we do most of the time. Except for me. I never do that.