DESCRIPTION OF THERAPY

The therapeutic relationship is a precious gift to therapist and client.

During your first meeting with me I will ask you what you want from therapy. I will listen to you with great care and patience and ask you to describe your life at home, work and in relationships. I will ask you what brings you to therapy, what is most important to you and where you want to go, what you want to change. As your sessions progress, I will assist you to observe and describe your concerns in their complexity, explore the conditions and causes that gave rise to them and help you to become a powerful agent for self change.

I provide psychotherapy to individuals, couples, families, latency age children and adolescents. While I am conventionally trained and skilled in the use of cognitive and psychodynamic therapy approaches, I also offer "mindfulness-based" therapy. Therapy of this type involves the focusing of one's attention to breath, thoughts, emotion and behavior, and then imagining and directing one's life courageously toward what is unknown and what is desired. It's a great approach to use if you want to change your emotional health, your perspectives and relationships. In the past decade the benefits of mindfulness practices and mindfulness--based psychotherapy have been investigated, validated and documented by medical researchers and psychotherapists as particularly effective in the reduction of depression and anxiety symptoms and as an aid to create a more fulfilling life.

I ask all of my clients to describe what they want from therapy, and I remain mindful of their needs throughout their therapy. My approach facilitates symptom reduction and helps clients to clarify and define their values and life purpose.

"I respect my clients and find it easy to foster deep trust and employ non-judgmental listening because I believe that therapy is a sacred work."

What is "Buddhist" or contemplative psychotherapy?

The Zen and Tibetan Buddhist traditions have much to offer western psychotherapy and medicine and have influenced my work as a psychotherapist through the mindfulness-based or contemplative movement in psychology. Central to mindfulness practices and "Buddhist psychotherapy" as some have called it, which need not involve Buddhism per-se, is the understanding that our views, perspectives and actions arise and fall away continuously and are not permanent or absolute or solid or “The way things are.” The understanding is that every moment in a continuous (and mostly unnoticed) stream of thoughts, feelings and behaviors, what we do, what we think and say define our view of self and other, our concepts of past, present and future. We are mostly unaware of this process even though it is how we create our lives! These streams of chatter take up our attention without our knowing that they do, like they are “out there”, not of our making, as if what we see, feel and think is one big observation of what goes on in the world. However, through mindful examination of this internal chatter, which means focusing on our senses, and "watching" our thoughts, we can begin to see that a lot of our views and behaviors are actually just so many projections of mind. You could say that through our eyes, ears and sense of touch and smell, and through thinking---labeling, putting words on, and acting in the world, we take in what is around us and then represent these data to ourselves as facts, but it's really mostly our thinking, labeling, imputing meaning to things that, in themselves do not have inherent meaning. However, when we begin to pay attention one-mindfully to our internal mental processes of observing and describing, we can make choices and engineer our lives to fit better with the conditions around us as well as within us. Simply put, we can begin to decide how we are going to use our minds and become wiser and happier by paying attention, deconstructing and constructing meaning and taking action wisely and joyfully.

Some individuals choose to use mindfulness practices in their lives in the service of helping others or fulfilling their own spiritual aims (see the Dalai Lama's teachings on cultivating the mind: http://www.dalailama.com/page.18.htm).

A lot of the issues that we bring to the therapist come from unrecognized chains of thought, emotion and behavior and our habitual ways of clinging to, or pushing away, pleasant and painful experiences that issue from these “chains” or streams of thinking, most of which we perceive through a very narrow and biased lens and then reconstitute in the form of overused stories.

"Quite often we feel as though life has acted upon us and that we have little ability to shape our lives."

In short, mindfulness-based therapy can help us learn to stand still and become aware of life as a dynamic flux of contingencies, that life, living, ourselves, are not really solid things at all; rather, they are fluid and change all of the time, and we can have a great influence on these changes. We can suspend our habitual chain of unconscious reactions and storytelling about "how it is" or "how it has to be" and embrace what is most emotionally painful and use our troubles as guideposts to cultivate wisdom and change. We can create a great life, moment by moment, breath by breath. Wisely, we can begin to reconstruct much of our experience of self, other and the world and become happier and fulfilled in the deepest and most intrinsic ways.