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Seeking Change: Individual Psychotherapy
"Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakes."
- Carl Jung
Dreams
As human beings, we long to be free to create the life of our dreams. The happiness we all seek arises from the condition of true human freedom — the freedom to love fully and to create a meaningful impact on this world.
It is the suppression of this freedom that is at the heart of human suffering. Sometimes, our freedom is limited by others in the world around us. Often we are taught to participate in giving away our essential freedom, assigning to others the agency that is our birthright. In doing so, we become dominated by inhibition, trapped by powerful forces inside that limit our freedom, and hence, happiness.
As a young aspirant on the Buddhist path, the Buddhist brothers would tell me, "The best way to reach the destination (their goal being Bodhi - Liberation or Awakening) is to know where you are, where you want to go, and the path between. Once you lay out your path, follow your path."
Said another way, the conditions for a meaningful life grow from coming to know yourself deeply, awakening to your dreams, and finding the strength of purpose to connect these two aspects of experience.
The more traumatic experiences we live through, including too much emotional aloneness, the more frustrating this advice can be. Trauma and neglect cause barriers to experiencing the self and its dreams. So knowing 'where you are' and 'where you want to go' can be foggy, full of false starts, and disappointments. And all the while, time is ticking past.
Often patients come to me with this dilemma. Life has become overwhelming and seems to have lost its meaning, joy, and purpose. Others are struggling to cope with anxieties and emotions in the face of great losses or sudden change. We need time to put our tender wishes and pains into language. By doing so, we listen to our deep subjectivity, calling out to the self to live the life that would be most meaningful.
Desire
To move forward in life - to reach our goals - we need motivation. Motivation has both conscious and unconscious aspects. It can come naturally from within, or feel like something we have to drum up. Sometimes it is experienced as pressure from outside.
If our motivation is not coming from a deep enough place in us, or if it is not integrated into our core, we may have a hard time reaching our goals. We can get stuck in self-defeating patterns and life circumstances, where different aspects of our experience fight one another, causing internal stress, and failed relationships and endeavors. There may be emotional blocks in the way of knowing and following our desires, or some desires can feel out of control. Perhaps we are troubled by the ethics of our desires when faced with the Other.
Together, we'll meet to assess your lived world, where you are feeling stuck, and what your dreams in life are. My work with patients helps them connect deeply to their core self and core emotions, allowing them to grieve losses and to slough off outworn patterns, and reconnect to a more authentic, joyous, sense of self. The more deeply they know and feel themselves, the more they are able to unlock their natural energy for reaching their life dreams and goals.
How To Start
Generally, people email me to set up an initial consultation session. The consultation session is a time for us to meet and discuss your situation, think together about what type of treatment would likely benefit you, and make a plan about scheduling.
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