My approach to individual psychotherapy encompasses six areas of intervention: listening to the body, tolerating feelings, modifying behavior, honoring the resistance, examining the therapeutic relationship, and raising consciousness. Which interventions I choose depend on the client’s goals and preferences. Interventions in one area lead to changes in others. For instance, learning to tolerate feelings leads to insight. And insight leads to behavioral change.
Listening to the Body
To function, you need your brain and its many thoughts, but your deepest wisdom comes from within your body. I will help you tune into your body’s innate intelligence. If you are feeling a particular feeling, we might examine where in your body you feel it—to help you learn more about where feelings come from and about how to tune into your body’s intelligence. If you are having trouble making decisions, we’ll delve into how to listen best to your body and its wisdom. At first, trusting your body can seem weird or unfamiliar. We’ll talk about trusting your body’s wisdom rather than many other sources of information.
Tolerating Feelings
People spend a lot of time suppressing feelings they find uncomfortable. They tend to fear emotions, such as sadness, longing, and anger. In therapy, we will spend time exploring the fears and beliefs associated with feeling these emotions. People sometimes unconsciously believe that if these feelings are felt in their fullness, they will be overwhelming or will never stop. We will look at the beliefs associated with feeling feelings in their fullness, and consider the idea that feelings flow through us and then pass. Feelings never stay. We will look at the information that feelings can bring us if we trust them—even depression. Sometimes, the best thing to do for depression is to just be in it, and feel it in its entirety: to be the best depressed person you can be. Sometimes giving depression some expression and indulging in it is enough to help it to pass.
Modifying Behavior
Sometimes I’ll help you discern what an achievable goal might be and encourage you to make a commitment to achieving that goal. The next week, we’ll check in to see whether anything got in your way. Saying your goal out loud to another person can sometimes be all you need to make a change.
Honoring the Resistance
All people have parts of them that they don’t want to change; they have many reasons for clinging to the familiar. They usually develop their habits and defenses for reasons that work on some level. I take the approach that we should honor the resistance and learn about it. The part of the psyche that doesn’t want the change has a positive intention. Together, we will access that part and work with it. Learning the intelligence of your resistance can shift things considerably.
Examining the Therapeutic Relationship
Some of the relationship problems you are having will be reflected in your relationship with me. Therefore we might spend time talking about our relationship to the extent that it reflects your other relationships. For instance, if you have trouble being close to people but yearn for closeness, you might also be blocking your closeness to me. We will examine those ways to learn about what happens and why—in the moment. I use my whole self and how I am feeling with you to help guide the treatment. I believe that what is happening in our relationship happens outside, too. So in looking closely at your relationship with me, you can heal other relationships as well.
Raising Consciousness
Sometimes, people don’t need to muscle through change at all—instead, they need to increase their awareness or consciousness of a problem or situation and then it changes on its own without intervention. If you bring new awareness or insight, you let your wise imagination (or unconscious) take over and problem-solve for you. Once you change your inner view of what is happening and become open to other perspectives, answers come. If you’re locked in a bad relationship pattern, for instance, imagining what the other person is experiencing can change your perspective enough to allow a shift to occur.
