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Clinical Practice

I’ve been seeing patients, clinically, since 2009. Over the past 15 years, I have worked in a variety of settings, including hospitals and partial hospital programs, outpatient community clinics, university clinics, and private practice. In these different contexts I have treated a wide range of psychological difficulty, including affective, anxiety, depressive, interpersonal, and psychotic disorders, among others.

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In my current private practice, typical clients include students, academics, businesspeople, mental health trainees and practitioners, and community members of all backgrounds and histories. Given my training background, I consider myself a generalist able to treat a wide variety of people, personalities, and suffering. I am probably an especially good fit for the self-motivated, those looking to see things from new angles, people prone to deep thinking and/or feeling, and those with creative instincts of one kind or another. Still, I would encourage anyone interested to reach out.

 

Typical Goals:

  • Improving cognitive flexibility

  • Growing emotional regulation

  • Decreasing interpersonal reactivity

  • Understanding and changing default relational patterns

  • Reducing unnecessary anxiety 

  • Better utilizing heightened sensitivity and/or unusual capacities for feeling

  • Improving discernment/decreasing self-destructiveness 

  • Experience more meaning and depth of feeling/less numbness 

  • Adjusting to college/new careers

  • Better understanding sexuality 

  • Improving interpersonal communication 

  • Facilitating honesty with oneself 

  • Identifying, learning from, and incorporating one’s shadow (frightening/rejected/shameful aspects of self)

 

Typical Issues Treated:

  • Family System Problems and Consequences

  • Self-Destructiveness/Self-Sabotage

  • Masochism-Sadism

  • Pride/Shame Dynamics 

  • Enmeshment and Boundaries/Individuation/Differentiation

  • Grandiosity 

  • Mood Problems

  • Hatred and Forgiveness 

  • Reactivity 

  • Rigidity

  • Interpersonal Confusion/Dissatisfaction/Conflict 

  • Identity concerns

  • Organization/Executive Functioning

  • Creativity Blockages 

  • Rumination 

  • Existential Despair/Nihilism/Meaninglessness 

  • Self-Esteem

  • Trauma 

  • Personality Disorder 

TREATMENT PHILOSOPHY

My view is that the nature of psychotherapy depends on the patient, what they are up against, and their goals. For this reason, the course and content of therapy is difficult to describe, but I think it only ever works in a context of empathy, respect, and compassion – not to mention humor (sometimes in life we can only laugh).

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At its best, therapy assists people in improving not just their immediate problems but also their baseline levels of peace of mind. This is achieved in myriad ways, which cannot be predicted prior to beginning treatment and depend on who the patient is and what their life and history look like, but it always begins with honest and creative dialogue. I have spent my life thinking about the process of human transformation only to have landed on a vision of therapy that is, at the end of the day, very simple. I think people have incredible potential to understand themselves, their problems, and the path to improving their lives, but to achieve any of this, the setting must be right. At the heart of it, therapy is just an interpersonal situation meant to foster change by way of self-understanding, and therapists are just people especially interested in facilitating that process.

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Because each person is unique and faces their own challenges, no two treatments are alike. At the same time, all good psychotherapy toggles between two intertwined tracks. The first is the practical. Psychotherapy helps a person to address the problems, concerns, or dilemmas that are causing existing discomfort and have often prompted therapy seeking in the first place. This mode of work involves frankness, “talking turkey,” and a pragmatic sensibility on the part of clinician and patient. The second mode of working is less concrete and predefined – more creative and dynamic. It aims not only to reduce distress but to improve self-awareness and self-understanding, factors that contribute to lasting change and freedom. Through the therapeutic encounter, painful symptoms and hurtful patterns can be thought and talked about in such a way that they are put in perspective, understood, and ultimately changed for the better. A foundational goal of psychotherapy is to foster new ways of thinking, feeling, and being, such that one’s natural strengths, talents, and idiosyncrasies can be put to good use and one’s life can be navigated more peacefully and more meaningfully. Ultimately, the magic of psychotherapy exists permanently in the most human stuff – all that is created between therapist and patient as the dyad wades through all that needs wading through. Ideally, psychotherapy helps people to take themselves both more seriously and more lovingly, in turn complexifying themselves for the good and making headway with respect to problems that need solving. Therapy is a serious pursuit, and so it should be taken seriously, but at its best, it can also be very fun – much like life itself.

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Attuned to the here-and-now as well as the bigger picture, I would say my approach to psychotherapy is informed by knowledge of different theories (e.g., existential/humanistic, psychoanalytic, mystical theology, Zen Buddhism), contemporary treatments (e.g., CBT, DBT), and my own personal sense that life cannot be lived practically, successfully, or ethically in the absence of equal parts compassion, courage, and humor. I am an engaged, active participant in the therapeutic dialogue, invested in fostering both concrete changes and self-understanding.

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