My Approach

Like with indelible ink, we cannot erase the impacts of the past and our pain. We cannot simply remove trauma, bodily limits, injury and aging, nor stop on a dime our repeating patterns or reactivity. Long-term avoidance of pain or living in the trap of unreasonable expectations and demands does violence to what makes us most human—our vulnerability; our right to enjoyment, limitations and lack; and our vitality. The wounded and wounding aspects within us, whatever their cause, need not remain only burdens, pure obstacles, or endangering dissociations.

Based on over twenty years of practice and ongoing intensive study, it is clear to me that treatment treats the wounds that underlie our symptoms, and therefore our symptoms are vital expressions of our human psyche-soma as it manifests and maintains our singular and complex existence. That we have symptoms is fundamental to how we experience being alive while also reflecting our attempts to solve for the difficulties of being real. Psychoanalytic treatment is uneasy, always incomplete, just as all humans are, and a loving inspiration to keep on becoming anyway.

In a psychoanalytic therapeutic treatment, what we’ll do differently is turn towards your symptoms while accompanying you to bare, and bear, the pain and pleasure differently. Addressing the internal relationships and translating their origin stories is crucial to deciphering the communications between the disparate aspects of ourselves, the world, and the world within us. The opportunity to become more fluent in the languages of our emotion, our symptom, and our desires makes us more legible and human to ourselves as well as more equipped to tolerate our blinds spots, limitations, and the hills and valleys in life. Social-emotional sturdiness, increased creative motivation, and deeper relational engagement are organic byproducts of trusting in our our own minds and our ability to communicate our deepest experiences especially if we've been hurt.