How I Work
Life leaves its marks. You need a compassionate space to reflect, process, and heal.
Existential-Phenomenology
Maybe you’ve asked yourself: What’s the point of all this? What the hell am I doing here? What makes my life meaningful? Those questions can feel unsettling, but they also point to a desire for meaning, fulfillment, and a life that actually feels good to live.
In therapy, I use an existential–phenomenological approach to allow us to slow down and notice what life feels like from your perspective. This isn’t abstract philosophy (though I sometimes wander there), but a way of helping you make sense of your lived experience and explore how to create a life that feels more real, more connected, and more fitting for you.
For even more information on this, check out my blogpost regarding what therapy with me will be like.
Psychodynamic and Relational
The patterns that weigh on us often reach further back than we realize. Psychodynamic therapy helps uncover the ways past relationships and experiences continue to shape how you feel and relate today. By bringing what’s often unsaid into the open, we can begin to loosen old patterns and make space for new ways of being.
Therapy is frequently a microcosm for how you are in the other important relationships in your life. Here, that way of being is met non-judgmentally and with curiosity. Oftentimes I will ask questions about your current here-and-now experience in session to get a sense for what you’re experiencing at any given moment. This can be helpful in gaining awareness for the various ways of being that you carry through all your relationships and experiences outside of session.
Mindfulness
So much suffering comes from being pulled into spirals of worry, regret, or self-criticism. Mindfulness offers practical ways to step out of those spirals. It’s not about “emptying your mind,” but about cultivating awareness and compassion in the present moment and learning how to meet thoughts and feelings without attaching a story or narrative to them.
I have been an avid practitioner of mindfulness ever since the first yoga class I took in college and it was the beginning of a lifelong practice. Several years later I took an eight week mindfulness-based stress reduction course that was critical in alleviating anxiety and the tools and perspective I learned in that course helped abate panic attacks that had plagued me.
I bring my experience with yoga, yogic philosophy, and mindfulness-based tools into my therapy work. Sometimes this will look like a meditative offering while other times it might look like a gentle curiosity regarding a story or narrative around an experience.
The little things? The little moments? They aren’t little.
— Wherever You Go, There You Are, Jon Kabat-Zinn
Influences and Resources
Throughout my site, I’ve added books or quotes that align with my methodology and process or that have influenced me as a person and a psychotherapist. I’ve consolidated them here for easy access. As a process-oriented therapist, sometimes these works raise more questions than they answer.
Grief
Bearing the Unbearable: Love, Loss, and the Heartbreaking Path of Grief by Dr. Joanne Cacciatore has heavily influenced how I practice and hold space for grief, not as something to beat or process but as something to hold tenderly and care for.
Mindfulness
Hardcore Zen by Brad Warner is a book that I enjoyed greatly as someone new to meditation and mindfulness. It’s a fun, casual, playful approach to what Zen is and one person’s journey towards it.
A seminal and classic piece on mindfulness is Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn. This book helps to explain what the point of mindfulness in everyday life is and how it might make sense in yours. This book has been a huge influence for me in terms of acceptance and surrender.
Thought-provoking Fiction
What happens when the world is blown up to make way for an interstellar freeway? The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams explores absurdism and absurdist philosophy in a classically humorous way. This book has been a lifelong influence in my life and has new meaning in our current era, questioning “what is the point of all this, really, anyway?”
I love science-fiction for the way that it takes large questions, blows them up, and then distills them down to their essence. In The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, we’re confronted with a world that experiences gender and biological sex in a totally different way than we do. The second act of the book is, in my opinion, one of the greatest and most bittersweet love poems to what relationships are and can be and how duty, to oneself and others, looks different for all of us.