How I Do Therapy

How I Do Therapy

I love doing therapy. I find it fascinating, deeply satisfying, and sometimes even fun. There are certainly hard parts, but it’s not all tearful, torturous conversations about humanity’s worst moments. There is often laughter, a great deal of love, and always the possibility that the next moment will bring some unexpected awakening.

One of the reasons I love therapy so much is that it’s a process of discovery, both for my clients and for me. It’s sort of like picking a lock—if you push on all those tiny little pins in just the right way, a door opens. It’s really wonderful to be with someone when they experience true freedom from whatever anxiety, trauma, or addiction has been haunting them.

Another one of the reasons I love therapy is the stuff we get to do in sessions. (That’s really what this blog post is about, I just got a little gushy in the beginning). I feel therapy should be like a creative laboratory, a place where we can experiment with taking risks and trying something new, maybe even outrageous. That’s why I tend toward approaches to therapy that are dynamic, creative, and experiential—that is to say, they respect that life is changing moment-to-moment, that we all have an innate source of wisdom, and that healing involves cultivating awareness of all aspects of ourselves.

So what the heck does that all mean? Let me illustrate it a bit for you by describing some of the therapies I use.

Internal Family Systems is one of my favorite therapies because it trusts each person’s innate capacity for wisdom and compassion. IFS therapy involves using special mindfulness techniques to get to know the various “parts” of us and why they act the way they do. My job as a therapist is to help you build a relationship with your parts by improving your communication. Different parts communicate in different ways, so we pay close attention to every aspect of our experience: physical body, mind, and emotions. For example, an anxious part who is trying to protect us from failure might get our attention with uncontrollable worry and a fluttering feeling in the chest. So rather than trying to get rid of this part, which is what most of us try to do first, we seek to understand and appreciate it so it will let us heal the wound that it protects.

Another favorite is Gestalt therapy, which can be highly creative and useful for helping people get un-stuck. Rather than talking around in circles for hours about what we think is wrong with our lives, Gestalt therapy focuses on engaging our experience of the present moment to unlock our energy for growth. What this looks like in a therapy session is a process of deep listening to physical body, mind, and heart, and discovering ways to express the truth of what we find there. A classic technique in Gestalt therapy is the “empty chair,” which is an opportunity to engage and confront people or things in our lives that are causing internal conflict. Exploration of dreams can also play a large part. Gestalt therapy seeks to help us remove the limitations we place on ourselves so that we can live lives of authenticity and freedom.

Traditional talk therapy, in my case, is an eclectic mix of approaches and techniques, including person-centered psychotherapy, Psychodynamic therapy, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, and others. It’s probably not fair to lump all of these into one category, but I did it anyway because I tend to move between them without thinking much about it. Collectively, I appreciate how they bring awareness to the connections between our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, and the unconscious forces that drive them. In therapy this usually starts as having a conversation about whatever issues are causing distress at the moment. This leads to examining and modifying the way you view and react in a certain situation, or talking about the past to understand how it’s affecting your present. This could be anything from understanding your casual dislike of a coworker to healing from a deeply traumatic experience. Either way, this investigation leads to a better understanding of why we think/feel/do what we do, and how we can go about changing things for a better life.

Sometimes stress is caused by simply being stuck in a difficult or uncertain situation. In this case, Problem-Solving techniques might be the best key for the lock. This could mean breaking down a problem (or problems) into smaller parts, then coming up with a concrete plan to solve it. It might also involve learning some new coping skills to help deal with stress better, maybe some techniques for relaxation and managing emotions, better work/life balance, or healthy boundaries and relationship skills.

Mindfulness practices are a part of every therapeutic approach, whether people say so or not. Mindfulness is really just making the decision to pay attention to what you’re experiencing in the present moment (simple, not always easy). This can be a regular discipline like meditation as well as a moment-by-moment practice you do as you go about your life. During therapy, I often ask people to describe what they’re feeling in their body or what’s going on in their mind. This is a simple kind of mindfulness that naturally deepens through practice.

So that’s a bit about what I do. If you’d like to know more about the therapeutic approaches I use or how I work with certain issues, feel free to contact me to schedule a session or a free 20-minute consultation.

(I should also point out that I conduct a thorough assessment and initial treatment plan with each client in our first session so that I have the best understanding possible of all factors affecting your current well-being as well as what you’d like to focus on in treatment. Treatment plans are evaluated on an ongoing basis and modified whenever necessary.)