Freedom is a heavy burden. The task of authoring our lives is a serious one, which cannot be meaningfully handed over to anyone else. In keeping with this belief, I work hard to respect the autonomy of the people I see in therapy. Rather than attempt to hand you solutions to problems in your life, I seek to understand with you as fully as possible the past and present factors that affect how you think, feel, and act. Understanding can, in itself, be transformative: as we shine light on aspects of ourselves and our relationships that initially seem confounding or problematic, we often discover deeper meaning and previously unforeseen options.
I cannot guarantee that therapy will yield any particular results. Engaging in the process may give you more options in your life and relationships; it may help you understand yourself with greater clarity and compassion; if things go especially well, you may find yourself feeling more real.
“The irony of [our] condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.”
I like this quote from Becker as a way to frame the problem of being a person (self-aware yet mortal). However, I believe that hope remains,and can be found in many unexpected places.
“Psychopathology is proof of psychological health. The individual who is distorted in his thinking is essentially carrying on an open war in himself rather than capitulating to the social slavery. His delusion system and his hallucinations are a direct result of this war with his lifetime situation—the stresses of his living and his efforts to defeat those stresses rather than become a non-person and a social robot.”
Each of us steps into the process of transforming, be it in the vehicle of psychotherapy or one of the many others, for our own reasons. I often work well with people who are:
Depressed/Disillusioned
Anxious about death
New dads
Little ones (ages 2-5)
Cut-off by family members (e.g. for political disagreements)
Highly sensitive but learned to dissociate from this part of self
Therapists and other healers