While every therapist is trained to handle a wide array of issues people may face in their lives, over time each therapist begins to recognize their personal strengths and excel in that particular place. Through my work, I’ve helped people navigate trauma, depression, anxiety, substance abuse and recovery, grief, loss, anger management, and even just straight up existential malaise. Over the years and cases, I’ve come to find that I particularly excel at a few things.
Imposter Syndrome and Chronic Self-Doubt:
It can be a strange feeling to be successful in your life from objective standards, and yet feel like you’re still not good enough and maybe never will be. Feeling like that can be extremely deflating, and can be traced back to all kinds of experiences and thought patterns that reinforce this in a person’s mind. I love working with people who feel like this in part because I find it so easy to find what makes a person great. My ability to recognize your greatness is tempered by a deep love and respect of the truth. I’m not going to tell you that everything you touch is solid gold, but I’m definitely not going to pretend all of you is awful just because you can’t run an ultramarathon at the drop of a hat, or write the next great American novel. You have greatness in you! If I can help you recognize it in yourself, you’re much better positioned to leverage it towards a life that is fulfilling without basing it in false hopes or impossible standards.
Recurring Relationship Patterns and Interpersonal Conflict
It’s very important to note that I’m not talking about couples counseling. I can do it, and I’ve even been told I’m good at it, but that’s not this. No, this is a question of what you as an individual bring into your relationships and what is happening that leaves you feeling stuck. Maybe you feel like you can’t help but consistently choose bad relationship partners. Or maybe you recognize you have impossible standards, either for yourself or the people around you. Maybe you just suck at talking about how you feel. (More on that in a minute.) Whatever the patterns you are trying to navigate, I am particularly good at helping people recognize them and, importantly, developing strategies that work for you in changing them.
Emotional Awareness and Regulation
This is my jam, dude. My clinical experience has shown me that emotional reasoning plays a much bigger role in our lives than perhaps we are comfortable admitting. For some people, the emotional processing we all go through can become a prominent and unpleasant experience where everything is just feelings, and it becomes impossible to make decisions. For other people, that emotional processing feels extremely uncomfortable and is ignored, bypassed, or suppressed as much as possible. I excel at helping people navigate both of those extremes and find a healthy middle ground of emotional and logical decision making. By maintaining this balance, you generate fertile ground for healthy vulnerability, making and maintaining healthy boundaries, and maintaining a clearer picture of who you are and who you want to be.
Through these strengths, you may notice a through line of pragmatic problem solving that leads to more confidence in who you are and what you have to offer. My training allows me to approach these individualized problems with a global mindset. I can see how anxiety and depression interact with these issues and adjust treatment accordingly. I’m not afraid of the size of the problems people bring into the sessions because I’m not afraid of who people are. To the contrary, I love people quite a bit. Everyone has something uniquely beautiful about them, and my greatest professional joy is helping people see those things in themselves and actually believe they’re real.