Counseling & Psychotherapy

Entering counseling and psychotherapy can be stressful.  After all, you might expect a drill sergeant who demands to know your innermost good, bad, and ugly.  Alternatively, you might expect someone who agrees with all your woes, your view that you are surrounded by idiots, that you are doomed, and who soaks with you in deep sympathy baths.  Though this might sound appealing to some, this is not what constructive, growth oriented, and solution focused counseling is about and I don’t offer it.

Your best bet of success in therapy is how strong your therapeutic alliance with your counselor becomes. It is a well-known secret in the psychotherapy profession is, that the biggest indicator of success is how much rapport you and your therapist have and how deep it runs. And this is why you want to be picky in your choice of counselor.

Here is my counseling philosophy: I listen with my heart and brain, I care, I listen some more, I employ my life’s experiences (the good, bad, and the ugly), and then I will share my thoughts.  

Together we decide what you want to address and in which fashion.  I will offer you choices in approaching the pain and different treatment modalities to lessen the emotional and psychological pain. Pain that might stem from loss of a partner, career, health (yours or someone’s who with you are in a close relationship), anxiety or depression.

My counseling goal is that your life’s joys, strengths, contentment and calmness increase and that your pain decreases. That you can live your life in a psychological equilibrium that knows how to maintain that path.  I believe that achieving these goals depends on building and maintaining psychological and emotional resilience.

The crux, of course, is to know how you get there.  We already know that the biggest factor is the quality of your rapport with your therapist.  If you don’t like what you are reading here, it’s unlikely that we are a good match.  Rapport aside, of course, it is important to choose a suitable theory and therapy.  Some theories are more person oriented; others are more solution focused.  Some focus on here and now issues, others are digging deep into past events.  A good counselor can draw on several theories and improve the overall therapeutic impact.

My primary go-to therapeutic approach is called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which is currently considered the gold standard in counseling.  It is focused on identifying and changing what keeps you from thinking, feeling, and living in a more satisfying and joyful way.

In addition, I inform my therapeutic approach with Positive Psychology, which focuses on psychological and emotional pain relief as well as on identifying, building, and facilitating existing strength patterns to increase joy and satisfaction in life.  I like to employ Individual Therapy where we focus on insight to overcome obstacles and I like to explore Victor Frankl’s thoughts on issues of life’s meaning as they tend to come up in my clients’ thoughts. 

Lastly, I offer Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR).  This is a theory and therapy that allows trauma processing in an additional way to regular talk therapy.  This approach uses bilateral brain stimulation to induce trauma processing and is geared towards finding a new standpoint and outlook in life that allows for the traumatic experience to still exist in our memory but with less or no pain when thought about in the present.

I sincerely hope that I have introduced my approach to counseling and psychotherapy in a comprehensive, easy to understand, and compelling way.  I love what I do.  It gives meaning to my life and results in creating and sustaining the energy, interest, and ever increasing expertise as a counselor.