Individual Psychotherapy
As a client in therapy, your main job is to share what’s going on in your mind as openly and honestly as you can, which takes a huge amount of courage, and also the willingness to trust another human being with the intimate contents of your subjective experience. As a therapist, I strive to make the best possible use of that trust in service of helping you overcome psychologically-based resistance to your goals and wellbeing as a person. As such, how useful therapy is for you necessarily depends on the quality of our relationship, which is as much about the unique pairing of personalities we happen to represent, as our own efforts to construct and nurture effective collaboration.
Relationship Counseling
I call therapy with two or more people “relationship counseling.” Compared to individual therapy, I function more as an observer and facilitator, than a central participant in the interaction itself. While I will likely offer suggestions about different ways to talk to one another, I will be mostly focused on helping participants engage each other in a useful, mutual, experience. You could see this either as a process of learning to behave differently toward one another, or of creating a space that enables a new kind of emotional experience. I integrate ideas from family-systems theory and a number of the major couple-therapy models, including Gottman, EFT, PACT, and IFS, but I have no formal certification in any of these “branded” treatment protocols.
Performance Coaching
Coaching is focused narrowly on one problem or one functional domain, without the larger personal context in which the “target” behavior occurs (or doesn’t). We are directly concerned with either the practical mechanisms getting in the way of a desired behavior, or of skill-building in support of a particular functional role, such as leadership or creative processes. In other words, as a coach, I’m there to help you figure out what to do, not so much to figure out why you just can’t seem to get yourself to do what you already know you should do. It’s more practical than psychological, though of course there’s overlap.