Individual Therapy
I provide intensive, experiential therapy to individuals seeking to liberate themselves from painful cycles within their relationships and within themselves so that they can be more free to respond skillfully and authentically to whatever arises— personally and globally.
I work in person in Asheville, North Carolina, or virtually with people located anywhere in North Carolina, South Carolina, or Florida.
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People I work with often come to therapy because they’re depressed, dominated by anxiety, or acting in destructive ways that bewilder them. They talk about feeling “stuck” in life, trapped in cycles of obsessive thinking, self sabotage, or repeated relationship problems.
Edna St. Vincent Millay remarked, “It is not true that life is one damn thing after another — it's one damn thing over and over.” Truly, it doesn’t have to be that way!
We may do great work together if:
You want to work through blocks, barriers, and/or problematic behaviors so you can do what matters most to you with more clarity, authenticity and flexibility.
You have been through an intensely painful experience, including loss, and need support processing and integrating your feelings and sense of meaning.
You want to go beyond the superficial and intellectual and toward what is true. Perhaps you have a sense that what we hide from ourselves ends up running the show outside our awareness.
Traditional, supportive talk therapy hasn’t been effective, or you are drawn to work that challenges you in new ways.
You need to work with someone who can keep up with your intensity, including feelings that come up in/about the therapy relationship and process.
Something I often hear from people I work with is that in past therapy they talked a lot about their thoughts related to their feelings and patterns, but in this therapy they could see and work with them directly in the here-and-now.
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I offer experiential therapy that has the potential to initiate deep, lasting change. I am trained in Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP) which is a flexible, present moment focused model we can use to work with our inner (often unconscious) parts and conflicts.
This approach is experiential, intensive, and psychodynamic.
Experiential means working in the here-and-now with feelings, bodily sensations, avoidance habits, and relational patterns. The focus is on one’s holistic experience: we work at the level of experience, rather than solely thoughts about it. This is sort of like the difference between talking about a slice of cake and actually eating it.
Intensive means that the work is calibrated, moment-to-moment, to one’s current level of capacity. This can be challenging and anxiety provoking, but not overwhelming. Working at an appropriate level of intensity allows old, life-limiting patterns to come into view and be disrupted, and for new learning to take place at a deep level.
Psychodynamic psychotherapy is a large branch of therapy that works with the unconscious, and is aware of how our early attachment experiences influence our current lives. This often includes the ways these patterns arise in the therapy relationship as an important area of focus.
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Typically, we will start with a two-hour “trial” session where we can experience how working together feels. Subsequent sessions are scheduled at a length and frequency that works for you. Although the work is fairly open ended, it is meant to be relatively short-term, so we will stay in communication about when and how we know we’re “done.”
My fee for therapy is $125 per hour.