Services
Individual counseling for adults, adolescents, and young children
When you enter individual counseling in my office, I provide a safe, private, and nuturing environment in which you can explore your feelings, including past pain. It’s an opportunity to take time to focus on yourself and what you need.
During our time together, you will be supported in working through your challenges, and will learn coping skills to manage difficult situations, stress, anger, depression, and anxiety. Many people find peace through focused and well-managed counseling. All that is required is that you’re willing to take a chance on success.
My philosophy is to work with you on specific goals, giving you direct feedback and assisting you to create lasting changes. I also help you develop concrete tools, using cognitive behavioral techniques that help in decreasing anger, depression, and anxiety. You’ll learn behaviors that help you to feel joy and be more positive about life.
When working with adolescents, I seek to eliminate self-destructive behavior, such as cutting, suicidal ideation, drug and alcohol use, and binging or purging. Then I bring in parents or other family members to work on increasing communication, rebuilding trust, and developing respect at home for everyone involved. With young children, I also work with the parents to help facilitate changes at home, school, and with peers. For young children the learning and expression of feelings is through play and art therapy while in session.
Family counseling
Family counseling allows your family to stop its destructive patterns and create new, healthy patterns of interaction. You’ll learn new ways to interact as a family that enhance your relationships and help you to resolve conflicts.
My philosophy is based on a structural approach to family therapy, in which we look at how the negative behavior or symptom is affecting your whole family system. We also look at the subsystems of sibling relationships, the parental relationship, and parent-child relationships.
My goal is to make your family more loving, functional, and successful. With well-crafted counseling, many people are able to revitalize their family lives and enjoy more healthy relationships.
Parental support
In this type of family counseling session, I work alone with the parents (or single parent). I help you develop new skills for communication between you and your child. You’ll acquire the parenting skills to set up consistent structures, discipline effectively with natural and logical consequences, give your child positive rewards, and maintain positive relationships. I also work with divorced parents to build a co-parenting “business relationship,” to create consistency for your children in both households. When there is an adolescent in the home, I work with the parents on how to build trust and foster independence with the teen.
Couples counseling
In couples counseling, I help couples to reconnect and rediscover the core value of their relationship. I work with you to rebuild the friendship that may have been lost as a result of fighting, stress, or just a busy life in which you find yourself juggling children, work, and your own needs. Together we make sure each of you feels understood and able to express your concerns.
My philosophy for couples’ work often draws from Gottman’s research and theory. I use specific exercises and skills to build a couple’s connection, manage conflict, negotiate to meet each partner’s needs, and develop new ways to communicate. Overall, my goal is to help you rediscover each other, reconnect as life partners, and recapture the special bonds that brought you together in the first place. Professional counseling can help you heal this crucial relationship in your life.
Psycho-education
Within counseling sessions, I teach you how to understand specific patterns of behavior and the dynamic of past feelings. This teaching process is called psycho-education. It can focus on communication, child development stages, parenting, loss and grief, depression and anxiety, and more.
I believe psycho-education is essential to understand feelings; trauma symptoms; and the cycles of domestic violence, family life, and child development. I often give handouts you can take home to help you understand what is happening with you and to not feel so alone in your feelings or symptoms.
Consultation in collaboration with teachers, psychiatrists, doctors, and other providers
In therapy it is important to work with the other professionals who are involved in the different aspects of your life. Therefore, with your permission, I work together with school teachers to create positive behavioral changes for your child, both at home and at school. I consult with psychiatrists and doctors, which can help if medication or medication management are needed to integrate mind and body. I collaborate with other providers, as necessary, to help your treatment progress. Basically, I am an advocate and champion for your mental and physical well-being, doing whatever is needed to help you attain your life goals.