My Approach To Psychotherapy
Individual Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis
I help individuals to work through depression, anxiety, relationship and career problems, and other emotional and psychological issues. My training as a Jungian analyst helps me to look at these through a prospective lens, that is, rather than seeing problems as merely neurotic, I tend to see them as unconscious efforts to work through old issues and move toward a more whole and effective personality.
One goal of my work is to help individuals develop a better relationship to their feelings and to their unconscious, leaving them more prepared to deal with the challenges that they face even after they leave therapy. My approach to treatment is designed to help people become aware of the sources of their issues and come to live in a more fulfilling way as a result of that understanding.
How do psychotherapy and psychoanalysis actually work?
The content of therapy is different for everyone who comes. But I believe that for most people there are specific aspects of the process that make it effective:
- Meeting regularly with a trained professional with whom it feels safe to look at what is and what isn’t working for you. Most of us tend toward avoidance, and the structure of therapy helps us to avoid avoidance.
- Collaborating with someone who is both objective and empathic.
- Using sessions to experience a full range of thought and feeling without critical judgment, in order to become more authentic.
- Becoming aware of old, reactive and over-protective ways of living that developed into habits, and eventually became unconscious.
- Learning to live in the present rather than the past.
- Observing how you relate, avoid, think and feel in the moment of the therapy session itself.
- Developing new and more flexible ways of relating to people and the world.
- Developing a greater capacity to relate to feelings without being overwhelmed by them.
- Building an alliance with inner resources.
- Exploring dreams to see how the unconscious is trying to compensate the conscious position.
- Developing an attitude toward life based on making meaning out of the difficulties we encounter.
Psychotherapy and psychoanalysis were originally designed to help people who had serious emotional problems. As therapy and analysis developed however, it became clear that they could be of use to a far greater range of people, including people who wanted to make their lives and relationships more satisfying than they already were.
For more information on how I practice click on Jungian Analysis.