Being human isn’t easy. If you are seeking therapy you are likely struggling, hurting, or finding life challenging in some way. Maybe you feel stuck, lost, broken, different from others, not like yourself, not fulfilling your potential, not good enough, not living the life you envisioned for yourself, or at a crossroads. Whatever is weighing on your heart and mind, let’s talk about it. I’m listening and here for you. You are not alone. Together we can explore how you ended up at this point in your life, discover the wisdom, and find a way through.
Finding a way through together in therapy means coming out the other side transformed. You enter individual therapy needing help with something about yourself, your relationships, or your life. At the end of therapy you leave feeling like a new, better, and changed person. If you enter therapy anxious, the anxiety settles and you feel more calm and relaxed. If you start counseling feeling depressed, the depression lifts so you feel more happy and alive. If you begin therapy traumatized, the PTSD gives way to freedom from the past and allows you to feel safety and trust. If you enter counseling feeling heartache, the heartbreak mends so that you can move on and open to love again. If you start therapy with low self-esteem, the insecurity subsides so that you feel more confident and positive about yourself and life. Whatever brings you to therapy the purpose is to ease your mental and emotional pain and suffering. When it is time for your therapeutic journey to come to an end you leave feeling capable of coping and managing things on your own, and that you have reclaimed your life and healed.
In individual therapy, to attain this we work on repairing and strengthening your relationship with yourself so it is healthy, vibrant, and resilient. We also work on developing your relationships with others and life itself so they are positive and fulfilling. The self-improvement and growth process begins with you opening up about yourself and unpacking your history. During our sessions you talk to me about what’s happening. You share with me what you think, feel, and believe about yourself, and tell me about the choices you make. You share with me what you think, feel, and believe about people, and tell me how you act in your relationships and how people act towards you. You share with me what you think, feel, and believe about life, and tell me how you respond to life and how life responds to you. Verbalizing your thoughts, emotions, beliefs, and behaviors reveals how you are relating to yourself, others, and life. Are you treating yourself well inside and out? How are you allowing yourself to be treated in your relationships? Are your needs being met? Are you putting yourself out there or hiding who you are? Are you meeting and engaging your life head on or holding back? Voicing your experience gets to the bottom of what is troubling you. It leads to identifying the skills you need to learn, conditioning that needs to be untangled, narratives that need to be re-written, and core wounds and injured parts of yourself that need healing.
The beauty of therapy is that as you are opening up to me as your therapist you are also opening up to yourself about yourself. In counseling you allow yourself to know and understand yourself more fully. You allow yourself to see yourself more clearly, and listen to yourself more deeply. You allow yourself to be honest with yourself, and own and express your truth and how you really feel. You let yourself in, and connect with yourself in an authentic and new way. Ultimately, therapy is about becoming your own best friend. In counseling you learn how to support and be there for yourself and provide the care, acceptance, compassion, and unconditional love you’ve always needed, but haven’t experienced. It’s about befriending your mind and heart, body and spirit, light and shadow, strengths and imperfections, and past and present wounds. This is the medicine of therapy.
In individual therapy we meet one-on-one in person on a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis. In our sessions together we may focus on the following:
- Empowerment and agency
- Clarifying and recognizing what your choices are, what you can and cannot control, what you can and cannot change, and what you are and are not responsible for in your current situation and what you’re experiencing
- Identifying and adjusting your expectations
- Your perceptions and interpretations
- Considering how your past experiences are affecting and playing out in the here and now
- Skill-building
- Finding more effective ways for you to manage, handle, and cope with things
- Stress reduction and management
- Breathing Techniques
- Self-care
- Sleep hygiene, diet, and exercise
- Reducing feelings of overwhelm
- Creating more stability in your moods
- Emotional regulation
- Increasing embodiment, and building your tolerance to sit with and feel your feelings and physical sensations
- Developing your skills of acceptance and non-judgment to reduce mental, emotional, physical, and behavioral reactivity and stress
- Identifying the hurtful and harmful stories you tell yourself about yourself, others, and life that are getting in the way of your peace and happiness
- Developing your relationship with the unknown
- Increasing assertiveness and decreasing avoidance and aggression
- Increasing self-compassion
- Increasing self-acceptance
- Reducing the judgment and power of the inner critic
- Shadow work
- Reducing shame
- Trauma
- Memories and formative events and experiences
- And more
You may already feel healthy, positive, and strong in your relationship with yourself, your significant others, and life itself. But, you may still wish to pursue individual therapy anyway to take preventative measures to sustain and enhance this sense of well-being. Or, you may simply enjoy the process of individual therapy; developing self-awareness and understanding; engaging in self-care; working on yourself to become the best version of yourself you can be; working on living life to the fullest; or having someone to talk to, listen, and be there for you.