How I Support Clients
During my experience as a therapist, I believe connection and attunement with another human being, or an animal, to be the most healing and valuable experience. When we feel seen, heard, and held in the comfort and validation of that moment hope is restored. Clients have the opportunity to experience empathy, compassion and unconditional positive regard when a decision is made to enter a therapeutic relationship where judgement is suspended.
My role as a therapist is to offer my clients a new perspective on situations or experiences that may be creating stress, sorrow, shame, isolation, stress, anger, disbelief, confusion, self-doubt, anxiety, or emotional distress. I will be prepared to offer strategies for managing the thoughts that can often take over and hijack the nervous system and easily turn into cognitive distortions. My commitment is to educate my clients on how to bring the nervous system back into balance and restore a sense of well-being.
Gaining self-awareness of your specific emotional and cognitive patterns and how they impact your nervous system and relationship to Self and Others is paramount to the time we spend together. Embracing and practicing present moment awareness is a key aspect in understanding who you are, what you want, and how to get there. As your therapist, I will be a support and witness to the courage, honesty, and determination this process requires.
If you are looking to start your therapeutic journey, please reach out.
Jungian Psychodynamic Theory
In our quest for personal agency, the urge to transform carries a paradoxical force of energy responsible for both the forward drive hidden in the unconscious as well as its own declining retrograde action. This tension of opposing forces appears necessary in creating an internal dialectical process that leads to unrest, cognitive dissonance, and a subsequent call to action. Without this internal Self-correcting mechanism, we would not have knowledge of the Hero’s or Heroine’s journey in our culture or the opportunity to surrender to its Call.
An environment that creates transformative opportunities is critical to supporting the psychological process that pushes one forward on the path toward individuation. Fidelity to the law of one’s own being is the journey on which individuation is grounded and requires a deep loyalty, trust, and commitment to personality development. Jung (1953/1977) believed individuation “means becoming an ‘in-dividual,’ and in so far as ‘individuality’ embraces our innermost, last, and incomparable uniqueness, it also implies becoming one’s own self” (para: 266).
A regressive tendency and the opposing call to renewal is a story common to all and a storyline often attached to adolescence, young adulthood, and the midlife crisis. An important question to consider is how the absence of a healthy rite to initiate may be influencing not only adolescence, but also any developmental milestone or life cycle, and in what way is the absence of a healthy initiatory rite causing psychological stress in the maturation process and becoming a regressive narrative.
Reconciliation, of contradicting choices or solutions, is a critical and valuable skill to develop. The development of discernment is a necessary tool and skill. Discernment does not support a one-sided position and develops from an accumulation of experiences that build the wisdom and confidence in one’s own agency to manage choices that serve the innate potential unique to the individual.