SPECIALTIES
These specialities reflect areas where I have spent a lot of time with clients. While one specialty may speak to you in your current situation, I’ve found that clients often feel some resonance across many of these specialties, while also having their own unique experience. If you feel connection with any of these areas, please reach out.
TRANSFORMATIONS / TRANSITIONS
It’s rare that we aren’t transitioning, whether that’s at home, at work, in relationships, in our social lives, or just within ourselves.
Transitions have 3 phases: letting go of the old in order to make room for the new, the metamorphosis itself, and welcoming in the new. These phases sometimes happen separately, but they usually overlap. Transitions can bring excitement and joy and anticipation while also generating fear and grief and discomfort. They often affect all areas of our lives, even when we think we are doing a good job of compartmentalizing.
Transitions often change how we express ourselves and how we see ourselves in the world. Therapy can help make our expressions and how we see ourselves things we consciously choose rather than keeping old patterns that may no longer serve us.
BEREAVEMENT
Bereavement is the emotional expression of a loss. It is conventionally thought of as coming from the death of a family member or a friend. It can also be from the loss of a relationship, or a job, or even a long held idea. Whatever the loss, it affects us personally and can affect our mood, our social lives, our work, and our will to get up out of bed.
The process of therapy can help with that loss, not by making us forget about what we lost, but rather by helping to move through grief into a place where we can find contentment and meaning in our lives with that loss. There is no wrong way to grieve, and I have worked with clients who say they feel nothing and think they should feel more, as well as people who feel devastated and want to stop feeling anything at all.
RELATIONSHIPS AND SEX
Our culture gives us a story about what it means to live “happily ever after” and that story comes with a lot of expectations and assumptions that often don’t serve us. I work with relationships starting with what the clients need from their relationships, and then draw out where those needs come from using family systems and personal history. I explore attachment styles and how clients both give and receive love and intimacy. All of this fosters better understanding of self and of partners, which creates more opportunity for greater connection and empathy in intimate relationships.
LGBTQIA AND ALTERNATIVE LIFESTYLES
Gender, sexuality, kinks, and alternative lifestyles like ethical non-monogamy have become regular topics in therapy, even when they are not the presenting issue for my clients. Psychological work centered on these topics can feel more difficult because they so often challenge the archetypes that much of our society uses as normal, gender-specific sexual behavior and expression. I have a sex positive approach and strive to make it as safe as possible for clients to express their unique selves in our therapeutic container.
MEN'S THERAPY
Society gives us a lot of archetypes that define what it means to be a man: the Athlete, the Father, the Lover, and the Breadwinner just to name a few. Those archetypes hold a lot of expectations, and they can put a lot of pressure on men to meet certain standards, including sexual prowess, income, home ownership, and athleticism. While investigating those individual qualities might be informative in learning about ourselves, they are often measured and used as a form of self-judgement that does harm. In Men’s Therapy I work with men to examine what their stories around being a man are, and how those stories serve them. We examine social and cultural expectations, the role of the patriarchy, and male role models. I work with my clients to explore what they feel are best expression of themselves, and how they can continue to grow into that ever-evolving expression .