My approach to adult therapy is eclectic. Clients report that my demeanor is active, warm, genuine, perceptive, direct, and sometimes humorous. I chiefly utilize psychodynamic, psychoanalytic, attachment-based, and relational therapy techniques.

With my patients, I am actively listening for how the unconscious mind shapes a broad narrative around their lives based on past experiences, in ways that can be limiting and counter to what is really possible. Throughout therapy and when beneficial, I also facilitate an ongoing conversation in the background about this new therapeutic relationship and what helps each client experience it more securely. Across this dialogue I rely on the client to let me know as much as they can about their experience so that they are able to utilize the co-created therapy relationship both for healing and ideally for more fluid intellectual exploration, to explore their cognitions past and present in a larger context. Clients often report that this relational work is liberating, exciting, and that it improves their other relationships.

Through psychodynamic techniques, I support clients in identifying the ways the unconscious mind has shaped the client’s reality since childhood and even infancy. I support clients in exploring their early relationships to get clues into how they experience their attachment relationships today -- whether that’s with a secure or a predominantly avoidant style, an anxious style, or a combination, depending on the situation. The goal is to ascertain what supports secure attachment and to begin most with secure attachment.

With a contemporary psychoanalytic lens, together with the patient I investigate these past experiences and “analyze” how they shaped them by establishing a more succinct, coherent narrative about past dilemmas, and how those concerns shaped us consciously and unconsciously. This is not the cold, authoritative analysis you may have seen in movies. I am the coach in this scenario, supporting the client by offering new language as we reach greater accuracy together and see what words feel right. The patient is the true authority on this language, and I guide things when necessary. Through this process we can integrate previously unconscious thinking into the session and bridge the conscious world together.