What to Expect
A psychotherapeutic relationship is different than any other. It’s a confidential, professional relationship dedicated to improving your quality of life.
In our first session, I’ll ask you why you’ve come in and exactly what you’d like to change in your life. If you’re not sure, I can help you figure that out. I’ll ask you about the ways this difficulty has impacted your happiness, your productivity, and your relationships.
You’ll most likely find you have things you want to talk about, and as you do so, I’ll help you listen more deeply to your body-mind by asking you to pay attention to thoughts, feelings, images, and bodily sensations that come up. I’ll make observations and connections to increase your insight along the way. We may do visualization work specifically designed to reorganize your neural pathways and ease “stuck” emotional patterns. I am at times receptive and observant, and at other times, active and guiding. Your growth and needs guide us.
In couples therapy, I’ll ask about the conflicts you’re currently having and the hopes you have for your relationship. With children, I listen to what they express in play and work with their imaginations.
Sessions typically last 50 minutes, though some circumstances benefit from longer sessions, typically 80 minutes when pre-arranged.
My Approach
Quality psychotherapy succeeds where good intentions and “knowing better” fail. If you’ve tried to make changes but failed to keep them up or can’t seem to perform consistently at the level you know you can, I can help. Your brain stores the emotional patterns that keep you stuck—and psychotherapy can make positive, lasting changes in these patterns.
In the last decade, research has shown that the human brain, which stores all the experiences and understandings that shape you, can adapt and change throughout its lifetime. This debunks the earlier scientific belief that “you are who you are” by age 3—which left adults few options but to “manage” irreversible damage. We now know that while early emotional experiences can set you down paths that can limit you, these “paths,” observable in your brain, can be changed. We can dim the fearful, hopeless, unhappy paths, and enliven your brain’s connections to the authentic you. The authentic you knows joy—and is naturally well-suited to it!
My approach is infused with attention to your whole system: your body, your mind, and the attachment relationships that continue to shape you. My intention is that the physical structures of your brain and the energetic systems of your body will reorganize to allow a greater ease and a greater lightness of being that extends beyond the complaint that brings you in.
I use combinations of conventional talk therapy, mindfulness approaches, and Lifespan Integration therapy.
Lifespan Integration Therapy
Lifespan Integration (LI) is based on recent developments in brain research. It appears to be significantly more efficient, effective, and permanent than conventional talk therapy in healing most emotional complaints, including but not limited to anxiety, depression and mood, trauma, anger, anorexia, concentration and relational difficulties.
Neuroscientific research is clear that emotional habits or patterns are wired into your brain–but not permanently. In fact, your brain is constantly rewiring itself. The problem is that without intervention, all that new wiring just follows the old pathways and ties you more strongly to the same old problems and feelings. And so they appear permanent and can even be mistaken for who you are–or how everyone else seems to treat you.
LI efficiently focuses the innate growth and changeability of the mind to wire you for emotional clarity and peace. The basic process can be thought of as a cross between a guided therapeutic meditation and mindfulness therapy. Full conscious memory is not necessary for events to be resolved.
Clients typically report a pervasive sense of “relief” and “calm” and report later their old “triggers” are gone. When the issue is fully addressed, these results are lasting.
Lifespan Integration appears to change your brain at a synaptic level, allowing greater emotional ease and “spontaneous” behavior changes, even in children. You don’t have to remember to be different. You are different.
