Telehealth only in Massachusetts and telehealth and in person on a discretionary basis in Vermont.
Freud believed that the goal of psychoanalysis is to free a person to love and to work. As a psychoanalytically informed relational psychotherapist, I wholeheartedly agree. Therapy is a process of liberation that frees one to love and contribute to the world. The liberation of one person, sparks liberation in the rest of the world too. I believe that each of us has a unique contribution to make in the world. I see therapy as a process of freeing people to love and contribute. By liberating ourselves, we liberate others.
Moreover, by healing some of the blindspots and wounds from our past, we are more able to engage with others in the present with an open mind, meet them where they are at without feeling threatened by differences. Our current world desperately needs this capacity, and psychotherapy can help a person develop this skill. In this way, therapy has the potential not just to change individuals, but the world.
As I listen to my clients, I am always listening for the impact of their current and past relationships. I listen not just for the story of their human relationships, but also their relationships with what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls "the more than human world" I believe that seeing ourselves as separate from the greater natural world underlies much of human suffering. Our unsustainable ways of relating to the broader natural world are connected to our own unsustainable ways of living. In attacking the natural world broadly and seeing ourselves as separate from the world, rather an integral part of it, we do damage not only to the environment, but to our own bodies and minds. In this way, I see therapy as a way of "Rewilding the Unconscious," a phrase that served as part of the title of a conference I co-facilitated in May 2022. I believe that there is a resonance between the human unconscious, those sometimes unruly, mysterious and unknowable parts of ourselves, and the wilderness of the so called "natural world." How do we remember our own connection to the wild and pay attention to the ways in which we have tamed ourselves in ways that are not benefitting us?
How a person's relational dynamics play out in their relationship with me as their therapist is also pivotal to change as I see it.
It is my belief that by exploring how we experience our relationships and conflicts, what our role is in creating those conflicts, and how we are repeating the past, that we can imagine and consider new ways of engaging with ourselves, others, and life circumstances. In this way, freedom expands.
This capacity for developing new ways of being forms the essence of creative living. As such, creativity is foundational to being human. While creativity in this broader sense is central in therapy with all of my clients, I also enjoy working with questions of creativity specific to writers and artists.
I also see spirituality as an innate human capacity. Spirituality is the capacity to live in greater awareness of our connection to other, human and more than human, living and nonliving. In our era of division, it is essential to healing the self and the world. Psychotherapy can address issues that prevent us from living in this awareness, including dissociation and other forms of numbing.
At the end of the day, our individual stories are about something much bigger than than ourselves. Our personal stories need to be rooted in the larger stories we share with the rest of the world, both the human and the "more than human world" (Robin Wall Kimmerer). How do you want to participate in the wider world? What are you here to do? I welcome the opportunity to dive into these stories together.
Please call or email me for a therapy consultation today.