Individual Psychotherapy for Adults
The mind for truth begins, like a stream, shallow at first, but then
adds more and more depth while gaining greater clarity.
—Saigyo
adds more and more depth while gaining greater clarity.
—Saigyo
My approach is: |
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Client-centered. This means you take the lead in the therapeutic relationship. It also assumes that you know best what you need, and that I am there to help you with this by facilitating a relationship that can contain whatever you wish to bring to it, a place for safe and respectful exploration of the self.
Existential-phenomenological. The existential dimension of the therapy acknowledges the fundamental importance of certain common factors that organize our lives—the main one being the relationship we have to being free. I consider freedom to be the overarching goal of psychotherapy: freedom from negative and unconscious patterns that condition our ways of being in the world and freedom for opening up to creative, new ones. The phenomenological dimension is as a way of orienting us toward your lived and felt experience as the source of meaning you will give to your freedom and relationships, your suffering and your joy.
Psychodynamic. The psychodynamic approach I take is informed by psychoanalytic ideas about the self, especially the unconscious. I will be curious about your past and behavioral patterns that emerged in older contexts. Many of our old patterns still operate in the present, yet outside of awareness. These are ways of relating to the world and self that, in their original context, were useful, but in the current context can be problematic. I think dreams and the imagination are also extremely important sources of experience and meaning making.
Buddhist-oriented. This means a focus on being aware and mindful of how feelings and experience are connected with particular thoughts and actions. From a philosophical perspective, it means taking into consideration certain basic aspects of the human condition, such as impermanence, interconnection and relationship.