A Personalized Approach to Achieving Your Goals

In our work together, you can expect a blend of active engagement and deep reflection, all tailored to your unique goals and needs. I often integrate psychodynamic and existential psychotherapies, which combine an exploration of both early life experiences and the larger questions of life. Overall, these psychotherapies aim to help you rewrite a more complete and useful story of your life and experiences. By focusing on what is deepest within, these psychotherapies go beyond treating symptoms to help you get to the heart of your problems. Brief descriptions of these approaches are provided below.

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Psychodynamic Therapy

Psychodynamic therapy helps people discover the root causes behind their counterproductive patterns and emotional suffering. Specifically, psychodynamic therapy allows people to understand “why” they do certain things. It considers how past experiences, relationships, unconscious motivations, and internal conflicts influence present-day thoughts, feelings, and behaviours. It often utilizes a person’s relationship with their psychologist as a mirror for examining troubled relationship patterns that were formed earlier in life. By exploring these formative experiences in depth, people can gain the new insights they need to break free from old habits and build the lives they want to lead. Broad questions that epitomize psychodynamic therapy include:

 

• What stories did you acquire during your childhood?

• ​How do these stories continue in the present and influence you today?

• How do you form relationships with others?

• How do you typically respond to conflict or disagreements in your relationships?

• As difficult as it may be, in what ways do you still need to grow up?

 

Existential Therapy

Existential therapy helps people address their fundamental questions about life and death, meaning and purpose, attachment and disconnection, and freedom and responsibility. It views many mental health concerns, like depression and anxiety, as typical aspects of the human condition and a timely “invitation” to reassess one’s path. Accordingly, it helps people think more deeply about their lives and explore their basic assumptions. In this way, it takes a philosophical stance toward mental health. Ultimately, existential therapy enables people to access their capacity to make choices and develop their lives. Broad questions that exemplify existential therapy include:

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• What is your personal philosophy on life?

• What brings you meaning and purpose?

• How do you cope with the inevitability of death?

• How do you navigate the reality that others may never fully understand you?

• What are your responsibilities to yourself and others?