Practice areas

I’m a staunch generalist. I believe specializing in specific issues as a psychotherapist can be short-sighted. It is mostly done for marketing purposes, and counterintuitively, research doesn’t significantly support its efficacy. I believe gaining experience navigating the gamut of issues addressed in therapy functions synergistically—that therapists can gain additional insight and skill into addressing  specific issues through their experience of addressing diverse issues—and by gaining familiarity with the depth and breadth of human experience.

This is also a matter of heart. I love learning how to help different sorts of people and how to address the core underlying causes of diverse issues, such as how developmental experiences, traumas, and stressors lead to core maladaptive patterns that manifest in a variety of mental health challenges.

Specializations can occlude therapists from focusing on more important things, like your personality as a whole, and other critical factors of effective treatment and the therapist-client match. Rather than assessing if your “issue” fits my specialization box, I’m more interested in how the entire geography of your life factors into the experiences you want to change, how well we get along and work together as individuals, and how universal adaptive change mechanisms can help resolve underlying issues and get you where you want to go.

You never know what life is going to throw your way—unforeseen events, challenges, and issues are bound to pop up.  As a generalist,  I have the experience and tools to address the next unknowns that life throws at you—rather than referring you to start over with the next specialist. Furthermore, the way issues actually occur in life is  very rarely as simple as specializations present them. Most of the time, challenges happen all at once: perfect storms of multiple intertwined mental health and relationship challenges, along with environmental stressors. This is where being a generalist pays off—in real life.

 As a generalist,  I keep your goals and vision at the forefront. I don’t miss the forest for the trees by having to get somewhere according to a contrived understanding of your “problem.” My interest in resolving specific issues is how they function in the total complexity of your life and where you want to get to, all things considered.

All that said, here are some examples of the kinds of things those who gravitate to my practice are dealing with:

• Self-persecution, severe self-criticism, and beating yourself up

• Transcending dysfunctional family systems

• Adulting, at large, and the many challenges that come along with it

• Thriving in early stages of your career, or when making career transitions

• Flourishing with atypical personalities and atypical lifestyles

• Deep feelings of being misunderstood and not knowing how to bridge the gap

• Compulsive maladaptive coping patterns, such as disordered eating, substance misuse, addictive behavior/process addictions (shopping, gambling, gaming, porn, internet use, etc.)

• Struggling to maintain fulfilling relationships

• Needing to tweak communication in your relationship, or struggling to communicate and get on the same page about particular topics

• Setting boundaries, asserting your  own needs, maintaining connection with your  emotions, and de-gaslighting from present and past relationships

• Fielding and navigating  relationships and systems that involve challenging personalities, such as personality disorders

• Imposter syndrome

• Complex developmental trauma

• High-functioning existential dread and angst

• Navigate subcultural or countercultural systems

• Being self-sabotaged by your own intelligence and/or empathy

• All of the challenges that come along with being an emerging therapist or therapist in training

• Bouncing back from devastating traumas and losses

Below is a fuller list of issues I’ve successfully helped folks address: