Services

I particularly specialize in working with young, middle, and older adolescents, helping them and their families deal with the particular challenges that the transition from child to adult invariably bring!  

Adolescents, these days, are experiencing more stress—and emotional pain—than ever.  Rates of anxiety and depression, among teens, as well as the ‘acting-out’ through troubling behaviors, are increasing dramatically.   

The use of ‘screens’, a central part of many teens life, can become problematic, yet their pervasiveness in the youth culture, makes the issue much more complex and difficult for parents to deal with.

The development into and through puberty has its own particular challenges in contemporary culture.  Porn is ubiquitous, and it’s a rare teen who has not been exposed to, or even explored, graphic, and troubling, images.  For too many kids, pornography is their real sex education!  Meanwhile, the growing ‘fluidity’ of gender and sexual expression amongst teens, while it can, in some ways, be freeing, can be highly confusing and create more questions and concerns.

Family life faces its own difficulties.  Teens are appropriately seeking freedom and experience as they grow and it is, as it has ever been, parents’ roles to support and guide this process.  Yet, parents are experiencing their own sets of pressures, and face their own struggles, often not being able to offer kids the guidance, structure, and support they need, in the ways they need it.  And, while divorce, becoming almost normative in this culture, can be freeing in some ways to the adults, it can also bring deep pain and confusion to the family.

I am skilled and experienced in working with the range of issues specific to adolescent development, those described above, along with the varieties of challenges of finding one’s way in a challenging world.  Those challenges can run from simply coming to terms with one’s changing self, one’s peers, parents,  schools and other authorities, to the more problematic psychopathologies, such as:

• depression 

• anxiety

• suicidality

• trauma-healing

• concerns about gender and sexuality, peer relationships 

• Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

• school and social problems

I utilize an eclectic range of methods, including psychodynamic psychotherapy, EMDR, CBT, problem-solving therapy, existential exploration, sandtray, hypnotherapy, mindfulness training, and family therapy.  The techniques I might find most effective depend on the particular needs and desires of the person.

I have been providing psychotherapy as a Licensed Psychologist for over twenty-five years.

I specialize in working with youth because they ARE the future, and generally confront very specific stressors with which I am experienced and skilled.  Yet, I certainly enjoy and am experienced working with the psychological/emotional issues of adults as well.

I work with the specific challenges faced by ‘younger adults,’ making the transition into independence and self-definition in the world, no small undertaking in contemporary society.  

I am trained and experienced with EMDR, an ‘evidence-based’ trauma healing methodology that has demonstrated its effectiveness for a variety of traumatic occurrences, both physical and psychological.

In my work with adults, I utilize many of the same techniques I described in my discussion of “Child & Adolescent Psychotherapy:” an eclectic range of methods, including psychodynamic psychotherapy, EMDR, CBT, problem-solving therapy, existential exploration, sandtray, hypnotherapy, mindfulness training, and family therapy.  The techniques I might find most effective depend on the particular needs and desires of the person. 

It is my experience that life can be radically, if gently, transformed through bringing greater attention to the way we make our way through life, the attitudes we hold, the things we think and say, and the images and ideas that fill our minds.

Bringing this kind of focused awareness and attention to our minds and feelings is the process of mindfulness.  It is a skill that can be taught and brought into all aspects of life, transforming the way we see and interact with our world.

While I teach mindfulness skills as part of my psychotherapy practice, I am highly skilled and experienced with teaching mindfulness meditation, along with a variety of other meditation methods, as a profound life enhancement practice.

I have studied meditation and mindfulness practice extensively at the Spirit Rock Meditation Center in northern California, and have taught mindfulness at, among other places, the Findhorn Foundation in northern Scotland and the Bodhi Center, on Bainbridge Island, Washington. 

“What do I need to do to be fully present in my current life?  What do I need to learn about myself and the way I have lived my life—the choices I have made— to this point?  Are their aspects of my deep past, perhaps intimations or half-formed awarenesses, that might be effecting me in ways I don’t quite understand? And, then, do I need to live my life somehow differently? Do I have some task to accomplish in this life that I’m, as yet, unclear about?  How to do that?”

More specifically, you might ask what might be interfering—experiences and learning from that deep past—that keeps you caught in patterns of unconscious feelings and behavior, and even physical and psychological symptoms?  Or, more subtly, but often equally powerfully, what is keeping me from deepest satisfaction and fulfillment in this life?  Whether they be unresolved childhood issues and relationships, traumatic experiences, or simple unclarity as to one’s ‘life purpose,’ these are the issues that not only keep one from living most optimally in the present, but have profound impact on how we complete this life, and approach our transition into what may follow.

A combination of Jungian sandtray work, existential psychotherapy, EMDR (a trauma-healing methodology), mindfulness practices, and past-life regression hypnotherapy, form elements of a path into a deep exploration of such questions and concerns.

Families don’t need to be deeply troubled in order to to seek to seek a healthier, more optimal way of relating.  Our families are really busy these days!  More and more single parent families, the economic demands on parents leading to less and less family time, devices!  Even if our children are largely negotiating their lives successfully, and we can provide a comfortable life for them, and our own lives, as parents, are generally satisfying, family life is, for many, if not most families, less satisfying AS a family.

The family-systems view of this is to describe “centrifugal families,” in which the demands and interests of the individuals in the family, pull everyone in different directions. It can be hard to experience a fulfilling sense of a unified, “whole” family in this focus on individual needs and desires.

“Creating Joyful Families” is a process for families which don’t need “therapy”, but who wish to more fully experience their interconnectedness, deep communication, and even unity as a family.  It is an opportunity to see one another more clearly and deeply and to get to know each other’s needs and ways of seeing the world through fresh eyes.  It is a chance to work out differences and the normal conflicts of family life. Finally, it can be an opportunity for parents to work to strengthen their relationship, or for single parents to experience the wholeness of their family system.

“Creating Joyful Families” grew out of a workshop I co-facilitated at the Findhorn Foundation, in Northern Scotland, for international families, and which was based in an understanding of “family,” growing out of Findhorn’s unique philosophy regarding the essential unity and wholeness of group — and family — life, and the embodiment of that sense of wholeness.

This way of building and strengthening family life can be experienced in family sessions, a kind of therapeutic, supportive process for families who might or might not need therapy, but would like to further develop their closeness and mutual understanding and love.