Psychotherapy

People often come to therapy when the usual ways of coping stop working, when symptoms are interfering with daily life, or when something inside insists that it cannot continue as it is. Psychotherapy offers a sustained, confidential place to think, feel, and make meaning — not in isolation, but in dialogue with another mind trained to listen for what may not yet be fully known or spoken.

Depth and Practical Tools

My work is grounded in contemporary psychoanalytic and psychodynamic psychotherapy — an approach that takes seriously the inner life: the forces we are aware of and the ones we have learned not to notice. This is the part of the work that protects depth, dignity, and the “soul” of the human condition. It is how I understand why a person suffers the way they do, not only how to reduce the symptoms.

At the same time, I do not treat theory as ideology. Many people also benefit from more structured, skills-based interventions when anxiety, panic, OCD, trauma responses, or depressive patterns are acute. When indicated, I integrate methods from CBT, behavioral exposure, family systems, and IFS-adjacent parts-work. These are tools — they are not the meaning. I use them when they help, not as a replacement for depth.

Making the Implicit Explicit

Psychotherapy is not “advice.” It is the work of making the implicit explicit — the motives beneath reactions, the unconscious bargains we strike with ourselves, the inherited burdens carried across generations, the protections that once worked but now constrict a full life. Often, relief comes not only from doing differently but from understanding why something has felt unavoidable.

Across the Life Span

For adolescents, therapy often helps with pressures around school, identity, autonomy, family dynamics, peer comparison, and the developmental conflict between needing safety and needing independence.

For adults, the work may involve relationships, perfectionism, caregiving strain, professional rupture, creative block, grief, or the residue of unresolved trauma.

Some of the people I see are outwardly high-functioning — they succeed, appear composed, and fulfill roles — yet they live with private collapse at the edges: exhaustion, irritability, insomnia, compulsive overcontrol, or quiet despair. Psychotherapy gives these states a place to be examined rather than just endured.

Depth and Symptom Relief

If you are someone who values depth — who believes that inner life, history, imagination, or moral seriousness matter — analytic thinking provides a language for that experience. If you are someone who needs relief from symptoms now, we may begin with stabilizing tools while working toward deeper understanding rather than in place of it. One does not cancel the other.

Intergenerational Trauma

My work also includes attention to intergenerational transmission of trauma, including work with individuals and descendants of historical trauma such as the Holocaust. That material will be addressed more fully in a dedicated section and can be integrated when clinically relevant.

What We Discover Together

You do not need to know in advance whether your needs are “deep” or “practical.” That is part of what we discover together. The task of psychotherapy is not to make you someone else, but to make more of you available to yourself — so that you are less governed by what is unexamined and more able to live, choose, and relate with awareness.

If you would like to discuss beginning treatment, or to determine whether my approach is a good fit, you may reach out to schedule a consultation.