If you are considering therapy for the first time, determining what services you want and which therapist to work with can be a challenge. It’s important to take into consideration both objective qualifications of a therapist’s licensing, credentials, and professional training as well as your own gut feeling or comfort level with a therapist. In addition to academic training, it is important that your therapist looks at his or her own issues and has the capacity for self-reflection, introspection, and the ability to listen with compassion.
Listen to your intuition or gut feeling as well. A feeling of rapport and safety between us is essential for successful therapy. In our initial session, notice how it feels to be with me:
- Do you feel comfortable?
- Do I listen?
- Do you feel that you will be able to trust me?
In therapy you can learn to:
- Process difficult emotions
- Recognize strengths
- Overcome trauma and post-traumatic stress (PTSD)
- Build resources and resilience
- Work through loss and grief
- Develop trust in your body and its responses
- Develop healthy boundaries
- Resolve conflict
- Let go of limiting beliefs and thought patterns
- Manage intense emotions
- Decrease mood problems
- Decrease anxiety
- Learn how to self soothe
- Balance needs for intimacy and autonomy
- Achieve greater emotional awareness and depth
- Learn how to assert yourself in healthy ways.
- Connect to your essential nature
- Connect to your inner wisdom/knowing
Psychotherapy requires collaboration between therapist and client characterized by a commitment of time and energy, as well as financial resources. You may expect to receive privacy, confidentiality, respect, and an environment of safety and compassion. Generally speaking, my therapeutic approach involves a deep look at underlying issues and, if appropriate, trauma release, with the aim of personal transformation and freer, more conscious and creative living.