Clientele & Services

Therapy with Adolescents

Being a teenager is a curious time in a human life. As a teenager you are old enough for everyone to expect you to act like an adult, but still too young for anyone to pay much attention to what you express. Expectations are placed on you by the adults around you regardless of how you may feel. The world seems to be happy so long as you meet expectations and do not inconvenience the lives of the adults around you. Often your distress may go unnoticed until someone complains that you’re interrupting a class or not participating or are failing to do what is expected of you. Family life often seems to move very fast and as a teenager you’re expected to adjust to change quickly and with compliance. Very little time, if any, is devoted to the distress you may be experiencing. It is easy to feel overlooked and unwanted in a world that looks through you. Often the work of therapy with teens centers on the respect/recognition that despite their youth the lives of teenagers are just as valid, just as rich and just as complex as any adults. In this case therapy becomes a space where the teenager may be heard, a place where their concerns can be honored and where his or her opinion is the one that matters. Teenagers are not difficult or broken; they are often unheard.

Therapy with Adults

As an adult, your relationship with time changes. The days sometimes seem to drag on, while the years fly by. Time seems to speed up and before you know it, you are not as young as you were. We believe that at this point in our lives we should have things settled down and figured out. Surely by this point in life we should be done growing and just be grown. It is easy to become discouraged and desperate when we look at our lives and think that we are so far behind where we ought to be. We pave over these feelings and the doubts that accompany them with a façade of competence. This façade makes us more socially acceptable all while hiding the desperation that brews within. In burying these feelings, many adults think to themselves, “who would ever want me with my imperfections, with my less than perfect life.” Therapy with adults often centers on acceptance. The hope is that in therapy we can create a safe space where we can reveal who we really are, what has really happened to us and what we really feel. In recognizing this, we can begin the process of accepting ourselves, in order to heal and move forward in life. Being an adult does not mean you are fully grown, being an adult simply means taking responsibility for continuing your growth.

Therapy with Couples

Relationships are difficult even when everything is going right, the moment things begin to go wrong we often lose sight of the person we love. We begin to hold our partners responsible for our fate. We think, if only they could do less of this and more of that, if only this person could be everything I need them to be. Ultimately, people are not made to be what we need them to be. So grows resentment as our partners fail our expectations and we begin to feel so underwhelmed by a person who once made us feel on top of the world. Distance continues to build between people who were once so intimately entwined, until one day while sitting next to the person you loved you feel completely and utterly alone. The loneliness is a heavy weight to bare. Some look for distractions, others numb with a substance and some seek connection in the arms of another. We will do whatever is necessary to avoid the feeling that as time passes, we feel more and more distant from the person we loved. At times anger or quarrels appear but they only mask what we truly feel, what we truly fear—losing our connection. The work of couple therapy is not an easy process. Often couple therapy attempts to foster honest encounters between partners. The aim is to create a space where both partners can voice their concerns and be heard by the other. The hope of this endeavor is to process the hurt and resentment that separates us, so that we may look across the couch at the one sitting next to us and see a person not a villain. It is a process of becoming acquainted with somebody that you used to know, someone you once felt loved by. In the end we may move toward or away from our partners, but couple therapy helps us make those decisions not from a place of anger and resentment but from a place of love and compassion.

Therapy with Families

Families are complex multigenerational ecosystems. At times within a family system it is difficult to distinguish between the past, present or future. Within a family system we may experience symptoms of trauma and dysfunctional dynamics that can even precede our existence. In addition to this, during times of great duress when one or multiple family members are in distress, the family structure shifts to accommodate what afflicts the family. A new normal is created and roles within the family can suddenly shift. A child, no matter how young, can be thrust into becoming a pseudo parent or they can be tasked with responsibilities no child should carry. A parent’s authority can be nullified, and some parents feel powerless in a family system where they are the outsider. These events can often lead to relational patterns that make family members susceptible to experiencing the same dysfunction in their future relationships given that such dynamics become so familiar. As a result, the work of family therapy often centers on realigning the family system’s structure. The therapist joins the family within their distress and begins a collaborative process where the concerns of each family member are voiced. The hope of this approach is to facilitate the family’s realignment into a structure that can effectively support and provide emotional containment to each of the family members. Family does not mean being defined by the people who raised you. Family is a relational weave where we come together to share of ourselves and support one another.