Therapy for Individuals
Welcome
We’re glad you found us, and we’d love to help you figure out if we’re a good fit for working with you. We work with adults and older adolescents who are looking for help in making changes and are ready to work on feeling and living differently.
We have a creative take on therapy, so working with us can be a little (or sometimes alot) different than a more traditional approach.
The differences are not so much in basic structure. We meet with you for sessions in our office, usually weekly. We explore your challenges and work on helping you make changes and feel better.
What is different is both the way we look at therapy and the holistic, mind-body methods we use.
Looking Deeper
For us, therapy is not so much focused on thinking about problems or gaining perspective. Those things are valuable, but we see long-lasting healing and growth as happening when you create the capacity to shift your fundamental experience of yourself, your relationships, and the world and respond in new and more satisfying ways.
Even when you’re sharing stories about your day, your week, or from some other time in your life, we are working with you to listen to the themes and patterns that are underneath the stories. As we do so, we help you to discover ways that you might be getting stuck in them and explore new options that truly help you move through your life differently.
We work from the premise that the mind and the body are connected, so that it is important to not only pay attention to how you think about your experiences, but also to how you feel about them emotionally–and to the way you experience them on a body level.
A Therapy Example
Sitting together and talking is just the beginning of our work together.
While we might start off looking at a conflict you’re having with a friend, you may find that asking for help causes anxiety. When you think about the situation, you feel small–maybe even trapped. We might observe that your breathing is shallow and that you have a sense of fluttering in your chest or belly. We may learn that it feels safer and easier for you to take care of things by yourself and that it is very uncomfortable when you need to ask for help.
As we help you to discover the possibility that you could learn to ask for help with more confidence, you may notice that you begin to sit taller and relax more; the fluttering feeling is replaced by a sense of calm and solidity. You can begin to picture yourself getting support from others in a new way, feel more balance between giving and receiving, and find a greater sense of hope.
Mind, Body, Action, and Imagination
We work collaboratively with you both by talking about issues and exploring them non-verbally.
We emphasize your ability to put your insights into action so that you can really experience yourself differently.
When we talk with you, we use mindfulness to help you gain mind-body awareness
As you are comfortable, we invite you to make use of movement and expressive arts approaches that can help you to integrate the changes on which you are working. We encourage you to discover and use your own creativity, both in and out of sessions.
Therapy can be hard, and it involves digging beneath the surface. But that doesn’t mean it must always be serious or intense. In fact, we truly believe that laughter is very good medicine.
We find that when true transformation takes place, it is frequently accompanied by a sense that a great weight has been lifted. Often the path to such change involves playfulness, inventiveness, and improvisation. This is a part of the work that we value and enjoy greatly.
Taking the First Step
If you have the sense that we might be a good fit for working with you, we would love to set up a time for a free phone consultation to talk with you.
