What Kinds of Problems Do You Treat with Individual Therapy?

Some clients seek help for specific symptoms such as depression, anxiety and panic, eating disorders or substance abuse. Some struggle with adjustment problems following losses such as death, divorce, unemployment or illness. Still others look for help sorting out troubling issues of ambivalence or dissatisfaction in facing life’s many choices.

What Type of Individual Therapy Do You Practice?

I use an integrative approach to psychotherapy that combines the best aspects of attachment based, interpersonal, emotion focused, psychodynamic and cognitive behavioral therapies into a cohesive model.

The therapy is focused more on the present than on a lengthy exploration of the past. It is important first to understand you in the context of your current developmental stage and early attachment history. Then, I try to quickly translate the important historical contributions as to how you may seem stuck in your life currently. Developing a clear vision of the kind of life and relationships you want to create is the next crucial step in focusing the goals of therapy.

Emphasis is placed on your internal experiences of feeling and thinking especially in the context of your interactions with significant others. Identifying core patterns or themes which contribute to self-defeating ways of thinking, feeling or behaving is the next stage in developing healthier alternatives to replace them. What follows is then translating that insight into concrete action steps.

Simply put, individual therapy should help make crystal clear:

• The vision of the kind of life and relationships you want to create
   
• The kind of person you aspire to be in order to build the kind of life you want to create
   
• Your individual blocks to becoming the kind of person you want to be
   
• The skills, knowledge, emotional safety and increased comfort with taking risks necessary to be successful in achieving and maintaining the above