Individual & Couples Counseling
See and be seen. Touch and be touched.
-Viola Spolin
With a background in addiction and trauma treatment , I bring to my practice the philosophy and belief that no truth is to dark or unbearable to be spoken. In fact, having the truth of your pain, wants, needs, and desires, witnessed, even if it’s just by me, is the key to healing your heart and freeing your soul.
You get to be seen
You get to be heard
You get to be validated.
And most importantly, you get to be the arbitrator of your life who decides who you want to be and what choices you want to make.
My job, is to witness all of it, and to help you witness it too.
This includes the many conflicting parts of you, that at times, are at odds with each other; wanting different things and creating inner conflict and chaos. With enough compassion, curiosity, understanding, and healing, psychotherapy will help dissipate the inner chaos and conflict, (and outer too), giving you insight into your past choices, and the possibility of a new authentic direction to move towards. One that’s in alignment with your deepest self . One that you were meant to take.
The question then becomes, will you take it?
I offer the following psychotherapy services:
Individual Psychotherapy
Are you feeling unhappy in your current relationship?
Have you experienced an unexpected breakup and now find yourself as an uncoupled single person and not sure what lies ahead?
Are you feeling lonely, and not able to get the love you want or keep the love you find?
Do you feel unseen, undervalued and taken for granted? Do you put other people’s wants and needs ahead of your own?
Is there always drama or a crisis in your life?
If you answered yes, to any of these questions, than individual psychotherapy will help you.
Specifically, it will help you learn about your attachment style, which I call relationship map, and what’s in that map that causes you to unconsciously travel down certain kinds of paths, with certain kinds of people. Psychotherapy will help you understand how that map got created and how to grieve what you need to grieve in order to create a new inner map to follow. Then, you will be able to attract, have, and maintain caring, passionate, lasting relationships in your life with others -AND- most importantly, yourself.
Couples Counseling
Are relationships always meant to be “hard work”?
Is there really such a thing as “the one” who’s meant to be your forever partner?
Can people get past deep hurt and betrayal that their partner may have caused or vice versa?
The answer to all the above questions is: that depends.
Couples therapy helps two people understand many things about their partnership including, why they chose each other, and why things changed between them.
It helps them understand their individual attachment style, which I call relationship map; how it got created, how it creates conflict with their partner, and how each person can heal what they need to heal within themselves in order to recreate that map and redefine their partnership. Sometimes that means a new beginning with each other, and sometimes it means parting ways.
Regardless of which turn the relationship takes, successful couples’ therapy helps people heal themselves and in turn, develop the relationship tools and skills they need to achieve emotionally connected and satisfying partnerships now and forever more.
Uncoupling
Do the best marriages always have to end in the funeral home?
Are endings really failures?
Will getting divorced “screw up the kids for life”?
Deciding to end a marriage is never an easy decision.
It’s especially hard when one person wants to leave and the other doesn’t. It does effect the children. It does upheave your life. And sometimes it really is the right thing to do. What matters most, is how you do it.
This is why uncoupling in therapy really should be a must!
In a time where it seems like divorce has become more commonplace than not, learning to leave another with love, and a understanding of what you learned from the other about who you are and what you want, can really help ease the pain of the loss.
Uncoupling will help you understand the importance of being a unified front for the children and keep them feeling safe, secure, and loved while you and your partner part ways. It gives both parties a chance to say what they need to say to each other, ask what they need to ask, and really hear, what the other has to say.
Sometimes, when this happens, couples experience more honesty and intimacy than they have ever experienced in the course of their relationship and they transition into couples therapy to try to work things out. Other times, it helps to give closure and a sense of completion to the relationship.
Either way, uncoupling the right way can make a huge difference in yours and your partners life.