Services
About My Clients
I have a special passion for working with artists and creative professionals as they wrestle with fears, fantasies, depressions, manias, and all the challenges not only of making art but of making a living through art. I also love working with adolescents — how I wish I'd had a therapist when I was in high school! — as well as folks working through addiction and recovery. I also work with couples of all stripes and with patients who are, like me, part of the LGBTQIA+ community.
My Background and Approach
The depth work of psychoanalytic therapy offers us repeated opportunities to grieve losses, honor fears, and understand traumas. All of which will help you to become more alive to your immediate experience — to flow more freely. I strive to provide for my clients a safe space in which to explore and express frustrations and longings, traumas and dreams, fears and desires. In seeking therapy, you're making the courageous choice to declare, "I want to live a better life." It's an act of strength, not weakness, to invite someone along on that journey. This is also the raw material of couples therapy. When couples make the brave decision to seek help, they almost always present with the same complaint: communication has eroded. In my conception, communication isn't the problem; it's a symptom of the problem. Together we will help you understand the moment-to-moment emotional truth of your cycles of conflict so you can experiment with new ways of reaching one another.
My Personal Beliefs and Interests
We live in extraordinarily stressful and demoralizing times. It's easy merely to glance at the newspaper and succumb to despair. Despair is what leads us to self-medicate, isolate, lose ourselves in video games, numb ourselves with weed and alcohol and food. It's what makes us either cut ourselves off from other people or, conversely, surround ourselves with others while still somehow feeling deeply alone. None of these behaviors make us sick — they make us human. (I once heard someone say that psychopathology is normal behavior, only more of it.) The first task of psychoanalytic psychotherapy is to turn down the volume on our internal shaming voice. In my office, all parts of you are invited and welcome. And when you begin to accumulate an experience of being embraced, rather than rejected, no matter who and how you are, then you can begin to transcend shame.