(425) 646-8665Individual therapy is a process of understanding yourself and the workings of your life in order to make changes that will make your life better.
Therapy is about feeling better. That means feeling happier and more satisfied with all the important parts of your life. It includes both the external parts of your life, such as your relationships with loved ones, your work, and your life situation. It also includes the internal parts of your life, such as how you feel about yourself, what you find meaningful, and any areas of emotional pain that you may be trying to overcome.
Therapy typically works to improve both the external and the internal parts of life. Working on external things may involve figuring out how to have better, closer, more satisfying relationships with loved ones. It may involve figuring out how to change your life situation, or adjust to painful changes that you didn't choose. It may involve working to end a self-defeating pattern, such as an addiction, or an area in which you seem to be making the same mistakes over and over. By clearly understanding how these patterns have developed, and by helping people persist in their efforts at change, therapy can help people make healthy, conscious choices in areas where they had previously been repeating old mistakes.
The internal part of the work involves another important aspect of feeling better. Internal emotional pain, such as grief, depression, and fear, can often be eased by deeply exploring its sources, and working to resolve them. The internal work is the work of understanding what is happening inside you, in the workings of your emotions and your thoughts. It is also about understanding who you are, who you want to be, and what matters most to you. This is designed to bring you a greater measure of peace, self-acceptance, and clarity about the workings of your life.
I use a psychodynamic approach to therapy. This involves carefully exploring the patterns in your emotions, your thoughts, and your life history, to come to a clearer and deeper understanding of yourself. That allows a person to make changes in his or her internal life, and external life. Psychodynamic therapy is a versatile and effective approach. Researchers and therapists from this perspective have pioneered extensive study of human attachments, relationships, emotional dynamics, and the development of the self. You may also consult my article on The Effectiveness of Therapy.
Specialties
Relationships
An area in which therapy can be especially helpful is understanding and changing the relationship patterns in your life, especially if close relationships have often been painful or unsuccessful. Therapy can work on relationships in many ways:
- Exploring and changing the unsuccessful patterns in one's love relationships.
- Trying to become more able to trust others, and to let others be close to you.
- Working individually to improve one's marriage, or to improve other family relationships. (This can happen along with or instead of couples therapy.)
- Learning to have deeper and more satisfying friendships.
- Exploring how your heart works, how attachments have worked in your life, and how you have navigated the waters of emotional intimacy on the one hand, and loneliness on the other.
Depression
Depression is a deep and lasting sadness, a sadness that seems to take on a life of its own. It is both psychological and biological. It is clear that some people are more biologically prone to depression than others. The psychological side of depression is tied to all of the emotionally important aspects of your life.
Even someone who isnÃt all that prone to depression can get depressed during really difficult circumstances. In that case, therapy might focus on how to get through stressful times, how to adjust to new challenges, and perhaps how to deal with painful losses.
If depression comes back over and over, or if it is just under the surface all the time, then therapy will probably involve a deeper exploration of the workings of your life. Therapy for depression can cover a lot of territory, including these things:
- How you feel about the course of your life, the successes and failures, and whether you are on a path that will be deeply satisfying to you.
- How you feel about the relationships of your life, about love, closeness, and family, versus isolation or loneliness. Are there people in your life that give you a feeling of having a home?
- How you feel about yourself, and especially whether you feel that you are someone that others will love, accept, and draw closer to as they get to know you better.
- Are there negative and hopeless patterns in your thoughts that tend to reinforce your depressed feelings and create a vicious circle?
- Have there been painful and traumatic events in your life that cast a cloud over how you feel today?
Anxiety
Anxiety is a form of fear that becomes a problem either because it haunts you most of the time, or because it comes in overwhelming bursts, such as panic attacks. At a slightly less intense level, anxiety is another word for stress, of the kind that produces tension headaches, insomnia, the over-secretion of stomach acid, and other stress-induced physical problems. Like depression, anxiety can be tied to all the various feelings and fears that you have about the world.
The "external" part of therapy for anxiety can be about getting through stressful circumstances, making careful choices, figuring out how to calm yourself when anxious, how to delegate, to pace yourself, and to avoid getting yourself into situations in which too much is expected.
The "internal" part of therapy for anxiety goes deeper because it usually involves fears that are strongly held. It might include these:
- The sense that success and performance are all that counts. The feeling that you can't keep performing forever, and that no amount of success makes the fear of failure go away.
- The fear that others won't love you. Often this turns into the sense that you can be wanted if you take care of of everything and everyone, and the fear that you'll be unwanted if you are ever weak or needy.
- The fear that the world is an unkind and unsafe place, and that any feeling of safety is temporary and unreliable.
Family of Origin Issues
Each one of us was powerfully shaped by the family and the environment of our developing years. For several years, when you were deep in the process of trying to make sense of life on this planet, your family was much of what you saw. Your family provided the first group of people for you to try and be close to, and also the first and primary source of feedback for how to think about yourself. These two aspects of you, how you understand human intimacy, and how you understand yourself, are virtually impossible to work on without looking at your family of origin.
The good news is that looking at your development in your family of origin often gives a person a much greater sense of self-understanding and self-acceptance. Exploring these things is a powerful way to change the way your life works now, especially by understanding and changing some of the habits and patterns that you may act out without realizing it.
Therapy for Fulfillment, Meaning and Satisfaction in Life
Sometimes, in the chaos of day to day life, the most important questions seem to get lost.
- What matters the most to you?
- What do you find meaningful and fulfilling?
- Is there a way to live your life so that you care about it more deeply, and stay closer to to what matters to you each day?
If there is a sense of something missing, or something unfulfilled, therapy can explore that, and help you find your way to a more meaningful way of living.