Experiences leave marks on our bodies & minds

Psychotherapy is partially about change, but personal change is paradoxical in that, often, it is only possible when you have good-enough access to an environment in which you are not being asked to change, an environment in which you are physically and emotionally safe.

Anyone, at certain times, might need help finding more nourishing “tools” or “strategies” for coping with intense feelings such as grief, fear, anger, disappointment, or self-loathing. Like most therapists, I know how to find and provide those, but they aren’t what create the conditions for change.

The most important action therapists can offer, in my view, is being focused on you as you discover or reveal—and perhaps express—what has been fragile or unacknowledged in you and your story: while simultaneously holding the discovery or revelation with strength and sensitivity.

In other words:

We need someone to witness our ways of being, offer kindness to them, and not be blown away by them.

When this happens, you then have the opportunity to see yourself through that person’s responses (a therapist, in this case), someone who’s giving their undivided attention without asking you to be any way other than how you already are. The parts of you that need more kindness, care, or attention will be easier to detect, under these conditions, and it will be easier to know how to meet those parts’ needs. A liberating self-understanding can then arise, not mostly through the intellect—although it’s involved—but mostly through feeling, sensation, or emotion. The approach taken by me and other like-minded psychotherapists is not always quick, but it is profound.

This orientation makes me a humanistic or relational therapist, and I’m particularly influenced by existential-phenomenological therapy. Unlike most humanistic therapists, though, my background in social theory and culture is just as important as my training and reading in psychotherapy itself. I see most problems as social problems and I am aware that all of our ways of acting and interacting are cultural as well as individual and familial.