A Personalized Approach to Achieving Your Goals

While you can expect our work together to be active and reflective, my approach is tailored to individual goals and needs. I often integrate psychodynamic and existential psychotherapies, which combine an exploration of both early life experiences and the larger questions of life. Overall, these psychotherapies aim to help you rewrite a more complete and useful story of your life and experiences. By forcing on what is deepest within, these psychotherapies go beyond treating symptoms to help you get to the heart of your problems. Brief descriptions of these approaches are provided below.

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Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

Psychodynamic psychotherapy helps people discover the root causes behind their counterproductive patterns and emotional suffering. Specifically, psychodynamic psychotherapy allows people to understand “why” they do certain things. It considers how past experiences, relationships, unconscious motivations, and internal conflicts influence present-day thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. It often utilizes a person’s relationship with their psychologist as a mirror for examining troubled relationship patterns that were formed earlier in life. By exploring these formative experiences in depth, people can gain the new insights they need to break free from old habits and build the lives they want to lead. Broad questions that epitomize psychodynamic psychotherapy include:

 

• What stories did you acquire during your childhood?

• How do these stories persist in the present and influence you now?

• How do you form relationships with others?

• How do you typically respond to conflict or disagreements in your relationships?

• As difficult as it may be, in what ways do you still need to grow up?

 

Existential Psychotherapy

Existential psychotherapy helps people address their fundamental questions about life and death, meaning and purpose, attachment and disconnection, and freedom and responsibility. It views many mental health concerns, like depression and anxiety, as typical aspects of the human condition and a timely “invitation” to reassess one’s path. Accordingly, it helps people think more deeply about their lives and explore their basic assumptions. In this way, it takes a philosophical stance toward mental health. Ultimately, existential psychotherapy enables people to access their capacity to make choices and develop their lives. Broad Questions that exemplify existential psychotherapy include:

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• What is your personal philosophy about life?

• What brings you meaning and purpose?

• How do you cope with the inevitability of death?

• How do you deal with feelings of isolation and loneliness?

• What are your responsibilities to yourself and others?