Treatment Services
Work & Stress Management
Individual Psychotherapy: How Treatment Works & What to Expect
At various points in our lives we are be faced with challenges and may find ourselves running the same loop through our minds, not being able to find a clear way out. At such times, another person's perspective, along with their emotional support, can help break such repetitive thinking.
Individual psychotherapy involves entering into a confidential, open and honest dialogue in which you can take a close look at your life, your past, your current circumstances and your decisions. In the process you can find out more about who you really are, and bring into focus how you can more freely imagine, explore, and then pursue your particular interests and dreams. Over the years I have seen considerable benefit in focusing on what is felt within the therapeutic relationship as a valuable source of understanding limitations and discovering possibilities for change. I pay careful attention to, and collaboratively explore, the subtleties and intricacies of personal and interpersonal experiences as they unfold in the moment. In a creative and sometimes playful manner, we will begin to imagine and explore new ways of seeing yourself, open up new ways of relating to others, and in the process overcome negative expectations. The goal is to liberate you from unsatisfying or painful patterns in your personal or work life and move you towards becoming who you would most like to become.
Children very rarely come up to a parent and say “I’m having trouble managing my emotional reactions to X”, or “I have been noticing I keep behaving in the same ways towards people, and its getting me nowhere I want to be”. Children, but especially children who are in some kind of emotional distress or are otherwise behaving poorly, don’t have the self-reflective capacities to readily identify, monitor or regulate themselves in times of stress. It is typically an adult (parent, teacher, relative, babysitter, etc.) who notices when children are struggling or having trouble managing themselves. What parents find distressing that leads them to consider bringing their child to a psychologist is that their child’s behavior is at times baffling, even inexplicable. But whatever the case may be, when parents come to feel that their child is hard to reach, hard get through to, to influence or otherwise help, they seek outside help.
Child & Adolescent Psychotherapy: How Treatment Works & What to Expect
The way I work with children centers on fostering in them a greater capacity to verbally express their internal experiences. In other words, I work towards fostering the growth of self-reflective capacities - capacities that ultimately will make your child better able to deal with life’s challenges. To achieve this I create a safe and open space (separate from the rest of their social lives) in which your child will have broad, open avenues to explore what is going on inside of them. I will prompt your child to notice their thoughts, feelings and actions, and to put words to them. I will then help them to continue to think about them as they unfold and evolve. If your child is relatively young (usually 4-9) this observing and verbalizing is most readily accessible in the context of drawing, story telling, or some sort of imaginative (make believe) play. If your child is a little older (9-14) this usually takes place in the context of their accounts of recent events or competitive play, such as board games. And if your child is an adolescent (14-20), I will be more likely work to elicit aspirations and imaginings of their future and who they would like to become. Whatever their age or level of maturity, I will prompt your child to express what it feels like to be thinking about what they are thinking, and ease them into becoming more comfortable monitoring their feelings and actions and then reflecting on them. The very process of verbalizing experience in the moment, while retaining a connection to their bodily and emotional experience opens doors to a transformation of that experience.
Another way of characterizing how I work with children is that I model a process that will allow them to say to themselves “When I think of a question, when I am curious about something that is going on with me, it’s okay to be curious and think about it.” I aim to act as a catalyst with regard to your child’s growing capacity to look reflectively at his or her own mind and the mind of others. This will greatly reduce your child’s susceptibility to being overwhelmed and subject to emotional and/or behavioral dysregulation at home, in the classroom and elsewhere. More readily and more effectively expressing themselves to others, along with better understanding of others, will increase the likelihood that your child will behave better in the world, and this behaving better in the world in most circumstances will result in others behaving better towards your child. My aim is to keep a sense of wondering and curiosity going for as long as possible during the treatment sessions. Your child can then more openly think about the thoughts they are having, even if they seem to be ‘crazy’ thoughts, and therein ones that they would otherwise be staying away from and not telling any adults about. In general, if your child can be helped to think about their experience as a process, then his or her problem-solving capabilities will be remarkably enhanced. If all goes well, a mode of self-reflection will become second nature, it will become part of who they are and how they manage themselves in the world.
Couples Counseling: How Treatment Works & What to Expect
Couples counseling is designed to enrich the communication between you and your partner, and in doing so overcome the impediments to intimacy that may have arisen in the course of your relationship. Frequently, couples seek help with their relationship when they have fallen into frustrating patterns of interacting that have come to obscure the enjoyable and gratifying ways you interacted with one another that came so easily earlier on.
Helping couples (and here I include not only married couples and romantic partners, but siblings, friends, and adult parent-child relationships) feel closer and get more out of their connection to one another has been one of the most gratifying experiences of my professional life. Seeing love, respect and gratitude return to and expand in important relationships is a heart warming and life affirming experience for me.
Couples therapy begins with my attuning myself to each partner’s perspective. At the very beginning, each of your points of view must be fully elaborated and understood. I will then focus on summarizing the core concerns expressed by each of you. In this way I work to make sure that I create three bonds, one with each of you individually and one with both of you as “a couple”. I view couple’s modes of communication as “the patient”, not either one of you in isolation. In focusing on the way you speak to each another, I heighten each of your awareness of how you have unwittingly become entangled in negative patterns of communicating. I can then suggest, encourage and foster alternative ways you can listen to one another, speak to one another, and interact with one another. My aim is to help you join as allies against destructive habitual ways of communicating that your mature and healthier selves don’t really want to engage in. In the process, I look for the positives in the relationship. When each of you feels valued and loved, you will have a much greater capacity to react non-defensively to the other's concern. I will help you express your complaints as requests, your distancing as feelings of vulnerability, and your dissatisfactions as wants and longings.
Parenting Support
In our fast paced world parents are continually challenged to provide for, protect and nurture their children often while managing considerable demands placed on them as employees, spouses, caretakers of their own parents, etc. Therapy that supports you as parents through these difficult and often confusing times can enable you to provide a calmer, more open and less stressful environment both for yourselves and your children. I see parent counseling as a collaborative endeavor, and work to establish an open, conversational mode of talking about parenting issues. In parents' accounts of difficult moments with their child, I collaboratively explore alternative explanatory stories that may be contributing to their child's behaviors, which in turn clears the way to family members acting differently. This approach can loosen up entrenched patterns of communicating that have lead to unsatisfying, frustrating or counter productive exchanges between you and your child.
We all know that balancing work and personal life is difficult to achieve in today’s “multi-tasking,” “hyper-achieving” environment. Being able to set priorities so that we can experience satisfaction with who we are and how we are living is essential to our physical as well as emotional health. Studies repeatedly show that our physical health is directly affected by how we manage stress, whether we are talking about cardiac health or the state of our immune system. When we have better balance in our lives we also have better health in general. In talking a close look at how you construct your daily life, we can explore how you can create space for connecting with yourself and enhance the flow of psychic respiration, circulation and digestion, all of which will facilitate your quest to find greater meaning, purpose and progression in your life.
Clinical Supervision
I have provided clinical supervision and consultation to psychologists-in-training in the doctoral clinical psychology programs at Columbia University, Pace University, and Long Island University as well at St. Luke’s/Roosevelt Hospital and the National Institute of the Psychotherapies. If you are a psychotherapist interested in consulting on individual psychotherapy cases, please contact me.
