My career has taken me to a variety of treatment areas, from inpatient hospitalizations to day treatment programs and finally to outpatient treatment, starting my own practice over 10 years ago. Throughout this time, I have had the pleasure of working with a wide variety of clients, honing in on my niche of working with adults with a variety of relationship concerns or struggling with depression and anxiety.
Early in treatment I like to let clients know that I tend to be pretty direct and ask a lot of questions; my perspective is that therapy is an opportunity to gain insight and applying that insight to help us to grow, making it a very active process. This can be, however, a very difficult process, so my secondary goal is to make it as smooth and engaging as possible. As such, I tend to incorporate my love of movies and television into session, linking our discussions to any and all examples I can with the hope that this helps to illustrate the sometimes complex concepts that we will discuss. And because therapy and insight can be somewhat bitter medicines, I find that bringing in a sense of humor can act as the sugar to help that medicine go down.
I like to gear my initial sessions to getting an overview of what specifically is bringing a client into treatment and to set the tone for how I may be able to help. Most importantly, I use it as an opportunity to welcome the client to offer me any initial feedback on what they have found has worked for them in the past, and on what hasn't.
