Approach

Every therapy is different, since it takes shape between two particular people. We’ll talk about your history and your feelings, but I don’t work from a manual. We follow what you bring and see where it takes us. Here are the approaches I draw on most.

My therapy office in Pasadena

Depth & Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

Moods, symptoms, and relational patterns tend to trace back to earlier experiences that live on in the present. Understanding matters. Insight alone can only take us so far. 

Change happens through experience — being witnessed, being met, finally letting something be felt or said. I try to court surprise. If we keep circling the same thing, I’ll notice it and ask questions I don’t know the answer to. The work is finding what neither of us has touched yet.

Relational Therapy

The familiar tends to reappear in the room. It might surface in how you bring something up, in the question under the question, in what gets felt between us. I pay attention to affect, to what isn’t being said, and to my own responses as information about what might be happening for you. When we explore these patterns as they’re live, something new can happen.

Jungian Psychotherapy

I encourage clients to bring in their dreams. Dreams bypass defenses and offer a remarkably compact picture of what’s happening underneath. They’re useful transmissions and often help guide where the work goes next. I’m also drawn to the concept of individuation, a conscious relationship to your own individuality and to others’. What does it ask of you? What does it free you to do?

Jungian Sandplay

Like a dream, a sandtray presents a snapshot of the psyche in symbolic form. Any single tray is interesting; meaning usually emerges across trays, in how the images shift over time.