Why therapy?

You can understand something about yourself and still find yourself doing it again.

Maybe you’ve spent years trying to make sense of an experience, a relationship, or a pattern that keeps showing up in your life. Why do you keep dating the same person with a different face? Maybe you’ve talked about it, spent countless hours thinking about or researching it, and maybe you found some perfectly reasonable explanations.

And maybe those explanations haven’t quite changed anything.

Therapy offers something different from trying to figure things out on your own. Not because someone else necessarily knows you better than you know yourself, but because something can happen in a conversation between people that doesn’t happen with our own internal thoughts.

Sometimes that means noticing what you’ve been overlooking. Sometimes it means questioning something you’ve always taken for granted. Sometimes it means finding language for something you didn’t quite know how to say.

And sometimes it means discovering that the question you came in with isn’t the one that you’re really asking.

But you don’t have to be struggling, or even have a particular problem you want to solve, to come to therapy. You might simply be curious. About yourself, your relationships, your dreams, the life you’ve lived, or the possibilities you haven’t explored yet.

Going a little deeper

I work from a depth-oriented perspective, which means I’m interested in more than the explanations we already have for ourselves.

Not because those explanations are necessarily wrong. They may make perfect sense, they may even be useful. But often there’s more to an experience than we’ve been able to understand or put into words with our intellectual minds.

I won’t tell you what to do. I’m not here for that. But that doesn’t mean I’ll sit quietly and agree with everything you say, either. I’ll ask questions. I’ll offer my thoughts, including when I see something differently. And I’ll want to know what you think, because whatever we’re exploring belongs to your life, not mine.

I’m comfortable in the deep.

We can spend time with the difficult, the unfamiliar, the contradictory, or the things that don’t make much sense yet. We don’t have to rush toward an explanation or turn everything we discover into something that needs fixing.

Sometimes the most interesting conversations begin when we stop insisting that we already know what it means.