I use a modern approach to individual psychotherapy that will empower your existing strengths. It is a systematic process to remove emotional or relational blocks in areas that prevent you from being your absolute best and making the changes you want to make.

There are a few key areas that make individual psychotherapy with me distinct from traditional psychotherapy. Working together, we will:

1. Focus just on the issues most relevant to your goals 
2. Use a building-block strategy that reliably changes entrenched psychological or behavioral patterns
3. Gain access to "new intelligence" about yourself instead of simply reshuffling information you already have
4. Utilize experiential (in the moment) learning tools to become more competent at using your emotions productively
5. Be able to tell quickly if the work we are doing is actually starting to address your concerns
6. Make adjustments in our approach if either of us notice that your goals aren't being addressed by psychotherapy 
7. Respect the parts of you that are hardest to change and position ourselves as allies with them. Things that won't change easily earn that status for a reason. We can learn about extraordinary capacities we thought we never had when we seek to understand and appreciate the hidden positive agenda behind some of our least liked or understood aspects of our personality.
8. Know exactly when and why it is relevant to discuss things in your past including your childhood or relationship to your family of origin (no "fishing expeditions" that old-school therapists are sometimes known for that dive into your distant past without clear purpose or understanding of what to do with that information.)   
   

Research shows that real change is possible when the brain is emotionally activated in a controlled manner. Standard psychotherapy relies on talking about yourself, which possibly creates one of two unproductive scenarios in which you a) recall and exchange information at an intellectual level about your issue (not enough emotional activation to create deep change) or b) recall and become flooded with emotion about your issue (not enough intellectual activation to create deep change). 

If it is right for your situation, we will use a highly advanced form of experiential psychotherapy called Internal Family Systems (IFS) or Self-Leadership. In my experience, reliably avoids these common pitfalls of traditional psychotherapy and is a powerful approach to achieving deep and lasting psychological changes.

I am trained and experienced in several major approaches to psychotherapy and mental health and use several approaches interchangeably. IFS is the most complex and flexible of these and stands out among them in my experience.