Services

Click to view pdf

We may think we can control our grief, our terror, or our shame by remaining silent, but naming offers the possibility of a different kind of control… If you've been hurt, you need to acknowledge and name what happened to you… Feeling listened to and understood changes our physiology: being able to articulate a complex feeling, and having our feelings recognized, lights up our limbic brain and creates an "aha moment."  In contrast, being met by silence and incomprehension kills the spirit.  Or , as John Bowlby so memorably put it 'What can not be spoken to the (m)other cannot be told to the self.

How are you feeling?  Do you feel you are keeping up with your life? Is it full of meaning, or full of check lists? Do you feel attached and alive, or robotic and lonely? I imagine your answer varies depending on the day and time, right? Let's talk about the word trauma. Some people think it's overused as a term these days. I am one of those people. On the other hand, I feel our culture is ignorant of the deeper meaning of trauma, which has roots in psychoanalytic ideas from a hundred years ago.   Trauma means, to me, based on my analytic reading,that we have more on our psychic plate than we can handle, and so our true feelings are buried beneath us, like  gigantic weights that slow us down and dull our memories, our senses and our honest sense of reality testing. We often cover trauma over with maudlin sentiments, toxic positivity, religous dogma: anything but our own unique individual experience that when acknowledged can add sparkle, meaning, and depth to our personality, and richness to our identity and place in the world.  The pandemic was definitely what we call a big T trauma, meaning catastrophic in scope, and usually involving one single incident. But along with one single incident are many other stories involving small t trauma that also happened, during the pandemic and possibly in your life as a whole. Small t trauma in relationships, involving criticism, contempt, defensiveness and stonewalling  from  friends or family members, creates internal emotional crises which are invisible on the outside but feel horrible on the inside(Gottman & Gottman, 2018).  Most trauma is complex, and unique to the person experiencing it. The terms big T and little t apply more to EMDR treatment than CBT or psychoanalysis, but they put things in perspective. Whatever your trauma, I feel passionate about helping you move beyond your fears to a life where you can deal with the limited and unhappy negative after effects of difficult and challenging situations

Did you know that seven in ten Americans recently reported trauma??? If you were traumatized, you are not alone. You are in good company.  Please realize that trauma is not only bad, but can also be a catalyst for you to develop super powers that, once the trauma is over, you can use for good.

Ghandi, Confucius, Jesus, Martin Luther King, Jr, Socrates, Mother Teresa, Solomon, Buddha, the Pope and Oprah Winfrey, to name a few, have all experienced trauma!!

If that's not enough to convince you, Nelson Mandela,Pope Francis-Jorge Bergoglio,- Bill Clinton, Abraham Lincoln, -Mick Jagger, -Tina Turner, -Whoopi Goldberg, Barbara Streisand, -Lady Gaga, Jackie Onassis, -Jane Fonda, Stephen King, Maya Angelou, -JK Rowling, -Axl Rose, - Jim Carrey have also suffered trauma. If you have been traumatized, you are in EXCELLENT company!

Discovering joy is about discovering one's own capacity for fun and excitement.

Discovering Joy
“Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance… The more important a call or action is to our soul’s evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it.”
– Steven Pressfield (The War of Art)

The term self-care is used a lot these days. And it's a good term in many ways. But other words address the soul and these can also contribute to our well being. Words like play and fun and meaning and adventure. Feelings of all kinds are important to feeling joy. Without our emotional muscle attuned to the full range of feelings, we run the risk of being 'toxically' positive (positive in a way that is forced and shallow rather than based on genuinely good experiences). So to me, a huge part of self care is the capacity to allow ourselves a well balanced diet of experiencing ALL of our emotions. To me that is also self care. and can often be done better in the presence of an attuned and sensitive other person, either great friend, spouse, relative, therapist, whatever. But  back to joy, let me ask a few questions.  Do you know how to go about feeling more fulfilled, happier, even excited about your life? Were your parents good role models in this regard? Were they happy? Did they have emotional intelligence, emotional literacy, or did they lead lives of quiet desperation? For many of us, the idea of really understanding our feelings and making the most of our lives has been a far off dream. . More specifically, do  you long to run your own company, however large or small? Do you yearn to wake up in the morning with a project that feels like yours alone- that you don't need to put aside the minute a bill comes due? When you read the paper about somebody who is doing what you wanted to do, do you feel cheated, angry, ashamed that they got there first? What about relationships? Does your avoidant attachment style seem to be leading to nothing but Netflix binge watching? Do you wonder if there is any hope?
Psychotherapy is a place where there is room for you to:  
• Express, in words, sometimes for the first time, what has remained either hidden or unrealized until now, in some way that doesn’t make a lot of sense to you.
‍

Psychotherapy makes room for:
• Expressing the unexpressed
• Making the unconscious conscious
• Integrating thoughts and feelings
• Restoring a sense of agency and perspective
• Providing a platform for exploring our maladaptive illusions
• The opportunity to trust through being with another person
Source: Cozolino 2015


Ingredients for good psychotherapy:
• A secure attachment within a therapeutic relationship which serves as a setting for positive change.
• Emotional security so that new information can enter a previously closed system of beliefs.
• An opportunity to experiment with new emotions, actions and language  which allows for both editing and creating an entirely new script for your life.
• A good therapist studies a client, to see if the client’s stories about himself are blueprints for exploration, leadership and courage, or stories suggesting that he is waiting to be rescued by somebody else.
• A good therapist helps a client rewrite her story, with new plots, trajectories and conclusions, with herself or himself as the author.
Source: Cozolino 2015

“Is Life not a hundred times too short for us to stifle ourselves?”
– Friedrich Nietzsche– Friedrich Nietzsche

Discovering joy is about surrendering to our deepest desires and finding healthy ways to express them.

“Is Life not a hundred times too short for us to stifle ourselves?”

Our culture is full of ageing stereotypes. Listen to the news about the presidential race: age is the enemy regardless of a record of accomplishment, a good work ethic or the capacity to concentrate and deliver results. And some of this is understandable. On the other hand, it's fascinating how quickly a younger presidential candidate, with clearer skin and more obvious vitality, took center stage in July of this year. Absolutely fascinating. And the now older candidate, who was feeding off the ageism of the fact that the man he was running against looked older, was thrown off by this chain of events. Is it good? Is it bad? You know, I just don't know. But I am aware that not all of it is an illusion. There IS some reality to the stereotypes, and to the excitement about a younger candidate. For as the body ages, so do other organs in the body.  We lose elasticity in our skin, we lose hair, eyesight, hearing and so on. At the same time, many studies show advantages to the aging process, and these same studies show that older people report experiencing more happiness than younger people, and feel better able to control intense emotions. It’s not that older people don’t care, say these studies, but  that older people have more empathy, and the capacity to put themselves in others people shoes more easily. As we age, we become wiser, more tolerant, and able to take ourselves a little less seriously. We can be grand parents, grand friends, grand mentors to our younger colleagues, family and friends. BUT, as we age, we can ALSO put ourselves down and begin to hate ourselves for the aging process itself. This is an unnecessary tragedy, with sometimes dangerous consequences. And this is where CBT type psychotherapies can help you change  your thoughts, and psychoanalysis can help you transform your dreams, so that you can begin to enjoy yourself again, and to combat aging and decline with hope and imagination.

"Soon I'll be sixty years old, will I think the world is cold?"

“Friendship, marriage, psychotherapy, parenting and grandparenting-in fact, any meaningful relationship any time of life- can activate neuroplastic processes and change the structure and functioning of the brain.”

Newly published research by the Yale School of Public Health demonstrated that individuals who hold negative beliefs about aging are more likely to have brain changes associated with memory concerns. The study suggests that combating negative beliefs about aging, such as ‘elderly people are decrepit’ could potentially offer a way to reduce the rapidly rising rate of this condition.
The study, led by Becca Levy, associate professor of public health and  psychology, is the first to link the brain changes related to memory concerns to  culturally-based psychosocial risk factors. The findings were published December 7, 2015 in the journal Psychology of Aging:

“We believe it is the stress generated by the negative beliefs about aging that individuals sometimes internalize from society that can result in pathological brain changes. Although the findings are concerning, it is encouraging to realize that these negative beliefs about aging can be mitigated and positive beliefs about aging can be reinforced, so that the adverse impact is not inevitable.”