Finding what’s needed

​Psychoanalytic therapy (sometimes called psychodynamic therapy) has been strongly supported by research on practice outcomes and neuroscience, and has been shown to have the longest-lasting effects of any therapy - actually showing continuing improvement even after therapy is over (Shedler, 2010)! It's based on the idea that your pain is more than just what you're consciously aware of. In fact, neuroscience finds that up to 98% of what our brains do occurs outside of our conscious awareness (Gazzaniga, 1998)!

But deep, psychoanalytic therapy always starts with a relationship: it’s difficult to change anything if you're not in a relationship with someone who cares, and helps you to go at a pace that feels right to you and who can listen to your limits and explore what it is that can make the relationship feel as safe as possible to you, especially if you’ve experienced past trauma. And that relationship does something else important. It shows us where the points of pain are for you in relationship and gives you a chance to have a relationship where you don't get harmed in the same ways you have been in the past. We often have beliefs and ways of coping (conscious and unconscious) that, at one point in our lives, were the best possible way of coping with the world we were living in, but that now cause us pain. We still cling to these beliefs because there are parts of us that don’t know it is safe to let go of them. I view it as my job to help you find what isn’t working, understand why it has been hard to let go, and find ways to make it safe to finally do so. Once those old ways of coping are no longer in the way, it then becomes possible for you to ask yourself what you actually do need and want to do, without the interference of old, fear-based ways of being.


​Our psychodynamic/psychoanalytic work will be augmented by my interest and training in trauma-informed parts work and, for patients with an interest in it, my training in Dialectical Behavior Therapy, a skills-based therapy. Everybody's needs are different, so we have to figure out together which combination of these empirically-validated approaches will help you the most. Don't worry, you don't have to know what all those terms mean! We can just notice together when something we do really works, or when it just falls flat. I’m happy to talk with you more about what some of these terms mean, or how it all works, or we can just work together to see what seems to make things feel better for you. Every person is different, and it’s my job to understand you, individually, and listen to what you have to say about how you feel, and what’s working.

“Applicants for wisdom
do what I have done:
 inquire within.”
-Heraclitus

Gazzaniga, M. S. (1998). The mind's past ed., Berkeley: University of California Press.

Shedler, J. (2010). The efficacy of psychodynamic psychotherapy. American Psychologist, 2010 Feb-Mar;65(2):98-109.  doi: 10.1037/a0018378.