Psychotherapy
Do your thoughts and feelings stop you from taking action or cause you to take ineffective or destructive actions?
Do you wish you had better communication skills with yourself, your partner, and your community?
Does your inner critic get in the way of your sense of self and confidence?
As a Psychotherapist with over 22 years of direct experience, I integrate various aspects of many studied modalities including Mindfulness, Gestalt Therapy, Body-based Therapies, Psychoanalysis, Choice Theory, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Motivational Interviewing. This starts with employing deep listening and empathy as a primary mode to help you acknowledge, feel and accept your feelings and experiences, understand your changing needs, assess your inner motivations and outer behaviors, investigate choices and consequences, and challenge self-imposed criticisms and boundaries. As you strengthen your self-awareness and ability to choose your responses to life’s challenges and situations, your confidence and vitality grow.
Our behaviors stem from our beliefs, many of which were created subconsciously early in life. As intelligent, learning beings, we can unlearn and learn anew. The brain is most recently being understood to be plastic (ie. maleable) until the end of our lives. This fact informs my therapeutic work deeply and I utilize tools and experiences that facilitate your brain to change its perceptions and beliefs about the world.
Change is a process that demands self-awareness. I trust that change happens when we are ready and have the proper support and internal demand. Through making greater contact with oneself, each of us has the expanding capacity to feel deeply alive, able and joyous. In this present-centered work, I specialize in working through anxiety, addictions, trauma, grief & loss, chronic pain and depression, as well expanding parenting and communication skills.
It is possible to deeply change forever. The therapy hour typically looks like a face-to-face encounter wherein I encourage you to speak about and feel into the most pressing matters of the day. There is presence and care without pressure to perform. You may be offered experiential experiments using the body, awareness or speech in order to deepen your immediate understanding of yourself, including parts of yourself you ignore or marginalize. The goal of this practice is to empower you and expand your ability to choose as you navigate the diverse feelings and conflicting aspects of yourself. There is an invitation to take risks, share more than is typical, always with the understanding that this work is directed by you and your innate, internal drive to develop, heal, change and thrive. If you’d like some tips on how to choose the right therapist for you, check out this guide that I developed.
Through our interactive, therapeutic work together, you will learn within the context of accepting and kind connection that:
“It’s okay for me to have all experiences and feelings.”
“I am okay and allowed to be who and what I am.”
“I am not alone or alien for having my outlook and challenges.”
All of these essential developments allow you to become more mature, healthy and effective in life by:
Lessening your need to avoid or escape feelings and experiences through physical, emotional and mental tightness, alcohol and drug use, addictions of all kinds, acting out in harmful ways to self and other.
Lowering your core existential fears that create unconscious avoidance and poor decision making.
Increase your sense of belonging to yourself, your family and your chosen community of others.
Increasing your capacity to communicate clearly with others using empathy, assertiveness, patience and care.
I am devoted to helping you utilize the therapy hour to its fullest by creating take home ideas and work to build practical internal skills that enable you to manage emotions with more dignity, develop sustainable patterns of behavior by focused practice and deepen your ability to be in control of your life that is fully in line with your chosen values.
“Anxiety is the gap between now and later.”
What is Gestalt Psychotherapy?
The theory of Gestalt therapy takes as its centerpiece two ideas. The first is that the proper focus of psychology is the experiential present moment. In contrast to approaches which look at the unknown and even unknowable, our perspective is the here and now of living. The second idea is that we are inextricably caught in a web of relationship with all things. It is only possible to truly know ourselves as we exist in relation to other things.
These twin lenses, here-and-now awareness and the interactive field, define the subject matter of Gestalt therapy. Its theory provides a system of concepts describing the structure and organization of living in terms of aware relations. Its methodology, techniques, and applications link this outlook to the practice of Gestalt therapy. The result is a psychology and method with a rich and unique view of everyday life, the depths and difficulties which life encompasses, and “the high side of normal,” the ennobling and most creative heights of which we are capable. Gestalt therapists believe their approach is uniquely capable of responding to the difficulties and challenges of living, both in its ability to relieve us of some measure of our misery and by showing the way to some of the best we can achieve.
The theory of Gestalt therapy has three major sources. First is psychoanalysis, which contributed some of its major principles concerned with the inner life. Humanistic, holistic, phenomenological and existential writings, which center on personal experience and everyday life, constitute a second source. Gestalt psychology, the third source, gave to Gestalt therapy much more than its name. Though Gestalt therapy is not directly an application or extension of it, Gestalt psychology’s thoroughgoing concentration on interaction and process, many of its important experimental observations and conclusions, and its insistence that a psychology about humans include human experience have inspired and informed Gestalt therapy.
Gestalt therapy emerged from the clinical work of two German psychotherapists, Frederick Salomon Perls, M.D., and Lore Perls, Ph.D. F.S. Perls, known to many of his students as Fritz, was trained as a psychiatrist. He worked with Kurt Goldstein, a principal figure of the holistic school of psychology, in his inquiries into the effects of brain injuries on veterans of the first World War. Later, in the 1920s, he trained in psychoanalysis with Karen Homey and Wilhelm Reich. Laura Perls–she adopted the anglicized spelling after she came to the United States–studied with the existential philosopher Martin Heidegger and was awarded a doctorate in psychology for her graduate studies. The most important of her teachers was the Gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer. F. S. and Laura Perls fled Western Europe in 1933 ahead of the onslaught of Nazism to Johannesburg, South Africa, where they practiced until the termination of hostilities in 1945.
Ego, Hunger and Aggression was written during this period. The book, published under F. S. Perls’s name in London in 1947, is subtitled A Revision of Psychoanalysis. It included chapters reevaluating the analytic viewpoint on aggression. They suggested that Freud and his followers had underestimated the importance of the development of teeth, eating, and digestion, and that this developmental watershed was as important as the others noted by Freud. These suggestions constitute an early contribution to the development of ego psychology. The book also contained chapters from holistic and existential perspectives and chapters describing therapy exercises. These exercises were designed to promote physical awareness rather than insight, and were called concentration therapy.
With the end of the war, the Perlses emigrated to the United States. They settled in New York City, in a community of artists and intellectuals versed in philosophy, psychology, medicine, and education. Several years of collaboration with members of this group resulted in the training of the first generation of Gestalt therapists, a comprehensive formulation of the theory, methodology, and practice for this new approach, and a book describing it. Published by the Julian Press in 1951, the volume was entitled Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality.