ABOUT MY WORK AS A PSYCHOTHERAPIST:
In each of my past careers, the common ingredient of my success, what I did best and enjoyed most, was my ability to collaborate with others in changing their lives for the better in the face of difficult or toxic people or circumstances. Without stepping on the wrong peoples’ toes and without fireworks.
That's a pretty good description of what I do today, only now I do it as a licensed psychotherapist.
I’ve been a psychotherapist for over twenty-five years.
If you’re depressed, anxious, subject to self-sabotaging behaviors, or to the will of others who seem to really not give a damn about you or what you feel – or if you’ve been through a trauma and are now uncomfortably different than you were before – you’re in the sort of circumstance where a new approach, from a different perspective, might radically change things.
I work with individuals, couples, and families.
Although diagnostic labels often get in the way, my practice includes Mood Disorders (principally various levels and manifestations of Depression) and Anxiety Disorders. Within that Anxiety group, both Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) have become specialties.
Relationship issues are a recurring theme, whether between you and another, between you and some specific "others", or perhaps between you and one or more organizational entities. The most difficult relationship issues are often those between ourselves and our internal self-sabotaging programs -- those that run us from time to time without our perceiving them, let alone getting them under our conscious control.
In addition, I have long worked with Schizophrenia spectrum patients as well as others whose private and public demeanor seems to defy the usual diagnostic categories.
Finally, over the past few years I have developed a specialty of working with teenagers, mostly male, who have connection “and/or” disconnection issues with parental figures, usually their fathers. Some of these “teenagers” are in their mid to late twenties.
Whatever's going on with you, it’s made worse by stress. Particularly our Twenty First Century upgrade. No, it’s not just your own personal perception that the speed and intensity of things has changed. Navigating one’s way now often requires another hand in recalibrating one's course -- made even more difficult if one carries some previous diagnostic label.
Of course, as in all psychotherapy, the common denominator and key ingredient is the therapeutic connection. That's why, if finances or insurance permit, it's a good idea to meet with more than one of us to see who feels right.
I should also note that I am among the therapists selected by the Lawyer Assistance Program of the State Bar of California to provide interested California attorneys with the two free and of course confidential counseling sessions to which all members of the California Bar are entitled. My other long term institutional affiliation involves my pro bono services as Consulting Psychotherapist to Children of the Night, a privately funded non-profit organization dedicated to rescuing children from child prostitution.
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>My page on Psychology Today's "Find A Therapist" site pretty much says it:
"The function of a psychotherapist is to become obsolete as soon as possible." That quote is from my own psychotherapist and mentor, years ago, and it's the model and motto of my practice. There are, of course, exceptions: Those who return for a "tune-up" once in a while and others who call me in as co-strategist when some new turbulence hits. The other exception is my work with schizophrenic spectrum patients, who need a long-term connection with consensus reality from wherever they happen to be stuck on "the other side of the mirror".
What I strive to be in my patients' lives is an empathetic friend, confidante, and mentor. As well as a professional who can assist in ending that feeling of having been emotionally plowed under -- by a set of unlucky circumstances or other people.
Or sometimes, one can get repeatedly caught in some generalized emotional pattern, repeated over the years -- in different circumstances, with different people -- like remaking a movie script with different casts, in different eras -- why do we do that from time to time?
