Thank you for considering me as your potential treatment provider! Unfortunately, I decided to close my practice at the end of 2021. I do anticipate I will resume counseling at some point, but not likely for the foreseeable future. In the meantime, I will continue to add valuable resources to the site whenever I encounter them, so please visit the blog, podcast, or resource library for additional therapeutic resources until otherwise posted. Finally, for help looking for another provider, I wrote this piece (4 Steps to Get the Most Out of Your Counseling Experience!) with that in mind. I hope you find it valuable. For a quicker synopsis, please scroll the rest of this page, which includes my general therapeutic philosophy with reference to the areas I most commonly worked with.
Specialty Areas:
- Addictions & Compulsive Behaviors
- Anger & Violence
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Grief & Loss
- Life Transitions
- Trauma
Approach and Philosophy:
First, I do not hold the view that any of the above-mentioned conditions listed under “specialty areas” are problems in and of themselves. Rather, over the course of my personal and professional journey, I have found that conditions like these are often symptoms of deeper issues not initially recognized by the client.
Often, the ultimate goal of therapy is to “feel” better. There are three primary therapeutic intervention points which may be utilized in order to achieve that goal: cognition (aka thoughts), behaviors (aka actions), and emotions (aka feelings). Or, as a client recently clarified with me: “You mean the head, the feet, and the heart?” Yes, that’s exactly it!
Today, many of the dominate therapeutic strategies used are of a cognitive or cognitive-behavior nature. There is a premise behind these approaches: if a person can identify their irrational or illogical thoughts, and/or change their behavioral responses in certain contexts, they will feel better. And, this can certainly happen; however, I find that for most people, it is nearly impossible to change thoughts and/or behaviors, which are largely influenced by previous developmental/experiential inputs or traumatic life events, while ignoring or suppressing the related physical and emotional content.
It is for the reasons outlined above that I often see the deeper, more long-term changes in clients resulting from a therapeutic path involving the processing of emotions. I often say: “My job is to provide the safety, and your job is to take the risk.” While it is possible to “think” or “act” your way to feeling different, it is also true that one can physically and emotionally feel their way into thinking and acting different. Based on over 10,000 sessions, the latter approach is the one I most often recommend taking.