About
I’ve been a client and know how scary it is to look at your therapist on the first visit and wonder if you could ever trust him enough to share the secrets, inner conflicts, emotional pain, shame, fears, and hopes you kept concealed from others for so many years. Although we have landed on the moon and built technologies that include cell phones, super computers, electric vehicles, and AI, we remain in the Dark Ages when it comes to mental health. To this day there remains a stigma around seeking help when you need it.
My goal when we meet is to help you relax, feel safe, and start building a trustful, collaborative relationship. When you enter my office, I will welcome you with warmth, acceptance, empathy, and compassion for your suffering. I am a therapist for one reason only and that is to promote your healing, your emotional well-being, and your transformation into the most authentic version of you. Clients who do the work of therapy with me are enabled to shed phony behaviors calculated to win the approval of others or avoid rejection. They gain the courage to live as the person they were meant to be without having to make excuses, sacrifice boundaries or compromise values. This unlocks and unleashes their potential for healthy connection, achievement, creativity, and play.
When we begin our work you might not be able to articulate precisely how you want yourself and your life to change. Perhaps you just have a general sense – like “I want to be less depressed or less anxious,” “I want more meaningful work,” or “I want to stop dating the wrong person.” One of the first benefits of working together is to help you clarify and refine your vision of your ideal future.
My blend of thought-provoking questions combined with new ways to view old negative self-perceptions are an essential part of the experience. I will encourage and inspire you to move beyond old fears and self-imposed limits. You will enjoy the humor I share on the spot to lighten the atmosphere and bring us closer together as traveling companions on your journey of healing.
Learn to connect with your feelings.
My therapeutic approach incorporates extensive knowledge of how trauma, chaos, and stress during childhood lead us to develop unconscious strategies to survive by burying emotional pain so we are not overwhelmed by it.
For example, being told repeatedly by parents that your childhood feelings are inappropriate, wrong, or unacceptable will prompt a child to stuff her feelings. This early experience leads to adult problems with honestly sharing feelings, setting clear boundaries, being intimate, expressing love, and even taking one’s feelings into account when making decisions. All survival strategies developed during childhood backfire in adulthood by becoming a source of recurring pain. Using the same example, stuffing one’s emotions as an adult prevents others from knowing the real you and creates indirect, dysfunctional communication which cuts you off from genuine connection with others. Frequently the emotional energy that gets bottled up with no place to go leads to anxiety, depression, stress-induced illness, and intermittent eruptions of frustration or anger.
Regaining the ability to connect with, respect, and honor your feelings is empowering and a way to live authentically.
Internal Family Systems therapy helps you access the subconscious.
When you seek my help I do not deliver lectures on therapy techniques. I start by helping you to deeply relax your tense body and buzzing nervous system while reducing the distracting chatter in your mind.
Next, I use an Internal Family System approach. The IFS approach sees our inner subjective world as real and alive as the external world we consciously inhabit with other people. Using IFS, I will help you gradually peel back your defenses and enable you to access your subconscious, where you will locate, meet with, converse with, and even negotiate with what IFS calls parts.
If your life were a play, the parts inside you would be the main characters – each having arisen in response to your life experience. Each part has a distinctive role, outlook, plan, and strategy for your life. Through IFS, we will bring your subconscious parts into consciousness. Once your parts are conscious you will learn from them why they cause you to think or feel certain ways such as feeling feel sad, , lonely, depressed, indifferent, hopeless, anxious, irritable, angry, rageful, envious, jealous, vindictive, obsessive, addictive, perfectionistic, tired, and sleepy, among others.
You will learn how to work with these parts and persuade them to stop saddling you with beliefs and emotions that hold you back from being, feeling, and doing what you most want. Ultimately you will reclaim your power, increase your freedom, and achieve what you desire using your strengths.
Learn to face whatever the world presents.
In addition to IFS, I will utilize Existentialist-Humanistic therapy as a framework to help you face and work with the hard truths inherent in the human condition – death, aloneness, freedom, and the responsibility to create a unique meaning for your life.
Many of my clients wrestle with existential issues, predominantly the middle-aged and older ones. These individuals face many challenges, including empty nests, divorce, loss of loved ones, grief, aging, employment discrimination or termination, loss of religious faith, and questioning one’s core beliefs and values in the face of tragedy. I have effectively helped clients plan for the transitions they need to make to rescue themselves from boredom, burnout or career mismatch and move into a new career that provides them with the meaning, life balance or fun they have missed for years in their work.
The most challenging question is, “Who am I?” – something that can come up during a crisis or retirement and self-reflection.
I have helped clients find satisfying answers to the following questions: “Have I led a worthy life?” “Did I leave the world better than I found it?” “Is life pointless, or is there some meaning to it?” “Will anyone remember me, and is that even important?”
About Me
Helping others overcome suffering is my passion.
Beginning as early as high school, I became obsessed with finding the causes and cures of human suffering. This fascination caused me to delve deeply into philosophy, theology, literature, mythology, history, human evolution, archaeology, anthropology, psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience.
Suffering, its causes, and cures fascinate me greatly, and I continue to puzzle over it during psychotherapy with my clients. I feel thrilled and deeply gratified whenever I have helped a client to find substantial and sustained relief from PTSD, low self-esteem, depression, anxiety, existential dread, and other challenges. My greatest wish for each client is to experience his/her/their authentic self and live with purpose, meaning, inner peace, connection, creativity, and joy, free from chronic negative self-talk, self-sabotage, and needless conflict with others.
Here are some of my qualifications.
I am a licensed Professional Clinical Counselor (License No: 11679). In 2017, I received my M.S. degree with Honors in Mental Health Counseling. I have training in Cognitive Processing Therapy, Internal Family Systems, Compassionate Inquiry, Somatic Attachment Therapy, Breathwork, Havening, Clinical Hypnosis, Existential-Humanistic Therapy, EMDR, and Brainspotting.
In addition, I specialize in treating individual adults with depression, PTSD, anxiety, and existential issues. Virtually all my clients endured significant childhood trauma, predisposing them to develop these conditions as adults.
What makes me, me?
I have a sense of humor and a life-long love of comedy. I care deeply about nature, wilderness areas, and animals (especially the odd and endangered ones). Traveling, photography, fine dining, cooking, baking, hiking, reading, movies, and bicycling all provide me with great pleasure. I go snorkeling every chance I get see coral reefs and beautiful marine fish, although sadly climate change, pollution, and tourism have destroyed or damaged many coral reefs.
Being extremely close to my wife, my two adult children, my Australian Shepherd Willow, and my sister (who unfortunately still lives in New Jersey but plays Wordle with me daily) are essential components of who I am.