Getting Started

Making the initial call to a therapist is a significant step for many.

A consultation offers an opportunity to speak openly about one’s emotional difficulties in a confidential setting – perhaps like no other - and to invite a fresh perspective about personal thoughts, feelings, and experiences.  During those initial conversations, your reasons for seeking help, your background, goals, and what might be helpful in addressing your problem are discussed and explored.

The consultation often merges into treatment. Psychotherapy involves a partnership in conversation in a secure private space.  The collaboration offers commitment and sensitivity to accessing and understanding new layers of feelings and meanings about one’s emotional life and about how one senses and interprets oneself and others.  As the process unfolds, options for experiencing and acting with greater openness and flexibility in the world become more available. I have found parallels between expressive psychotherapy and one of my personal interests, jazz music. In addition to psychiatric and psychoanalytic training, the study of music helps me to understand dimensions of improvising together within a defined structure. During therapy sessions, we listen together to the rhythms, melodies, harmonies and dissonances of the narratives that are vocalized during the therapy process.