I am a Clinical Psychologist licensed in New York and Washington state, and I work with individuals and relationship systems confronting challenges with communication, productivity, identity, creativity, sexuality, and emotional experience.
As a therapist, my first concern is with creating and maintaining an environment where it’s possible to express anything and experience new possibilities. Within that environment, I work as an active participant rather than a neutral observer; what happens between us is part of the work, and the patterns showing up in the room usually have something to do with the patterns showing up in the rest of your life. The work isn’t applying a treatment protocol to a specific malfunction; it’s closer to figuring out together how things have come to be organized. This kind of work tends to fit best when the trouble doesn’t stay confined to one corner of a person’s life. The same shape tends to show up at home and at work, with parents and with partners, in a creative project and in your body.
Theoretically, I am rooted most strongly in psychodynamic/relational-psychoanalytic and cognitive-behavioral thinking, also incorporating insights from systems theory and attachment and trauma research. Broadly, this means I think of the mind as a dynamic system only some of which is conscious and rational, and that I understand human behavior in the context of its experiential environment.
At the beginning of individual psychotherapy, I try to get an understanding of your particular goals and desired outcomes from therapy, and some shared sense about whether my approach is likely to be effective for moving in that direction. From there, I would encourage you to share whatever comes to mind with as little filter as possible, while I work to understand the patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior implicit in that verbalized experience, and hopefully discover some new possibilities in the sense we make of all of that together.
