Practice Description
I am a pastorally trained psychotherapist who works with people who are struggling with painful and difficult issues, events, people, and feelings—without quite getting to where they want to be. The personal working values I bring to that role are kindness, respect, and enthusiasm—with a premium on honesty, openness and curiosity.
Like most therapists today I use a variety of approaches depending on what is most needed and effective for a particular person. My overall aim, though, is to help people build insightful understandings of why they get stuck in relational and behavioral patterns (often stemming from a very early time), and then how they can keep from repeating them. The tools for reaching that aim include traditional psychoanalytic interpretation, family systems dynamics, and humanistic therapy around people’s deepest spiritual values.
I am especially concerned for helping people work with their problems of personal meaning, relational conflict, and coping with trauma and loss. I also have extensive experience helping people around aspects of spirituality, vocation, and religious experience.
I have a long history treating traditional issues of depression, grief, marital and family conflict, ADHD, bi-polar disorder, social and personal anxiety, anger management, and stress response. I have worked often with multi-cultural and LGBT clients as well as with creative artists of many kinds.
I often encounter the deep pain of people’s experiences of disappointment, loss, and dehumanization in contexts they hoped would be trustworthy—family, school, religion, work, and personal relationships.
I am a trained and qualified administrator/interpreter of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assessment of personality types, and I use it often to help people understand in a non-judgmental way their personal choices and preferences in work, relationships, and personal life-styles. I offer “couple preparation” or pre-marital counseling whether for marriage, renewal, or other forms of committed couple life.