My Approach
How can we repair or change what we don't really understand?
​
I use an insight-oriented and emotions-focused approach to help you develop new insights into your emotional, relational, or career difficulties and explore new ways of overcoming them. Together, we will take a look at your underlying beliefs, especially those you didn't know you had, and see how these are informing your actions, habits and responses. We'll explore your recurring dreams, early childhood memories and important relationships, both those that wounded you and those that inspired you, looking to see how your past is impacting your future.
​
Many of my clients have gone to great lengths to avoid feeling their emotions, especially when the emotion is painful, or seems illogical. In our work, I will help you build your tolerance for identifying and feeling difficult emotions. You will find that your emotions have a deep logic to them, and hold important information about your needs and desires.
​
Insight & emotions-focused therapy sharpens your understanding of your relationship with yourself and with important people in your life, and will allow you to experience new ways of being in the world.
It is not a quick or easy fix, but it is not never-ending either, and research supports it as the best treatment for attaining long-lasting and significant life change.
When past meets present.
Our past experiences have a significant impact on how we experience people, places, and situations in the present. Even the experiences that we have during infancy can influence our personality as adults. I collaborate and learn with you about your previous and present attachments, separations, and losses.
​
We will explore the emotions and experiences that are problematic for you and learn how they came to be. Connecting them back to the attachment significance, needs and injury, we'll work on how to shift your experience in the here and now.
Why
Bother?
This is what we make conscious—the patterns that disable and limit people—the ones that give ulcers either to the individuals themselves or to recipients in their orbit.
​
We understand these patterns and with painstaking effort help the afflicted come to understand them in themselves and others. We help them respond strategically instead of reacting impulsively or holding back endlessly.
​
We help people separate the wheat from the chaff, see the forest through the trees, find the leading edge, sort through competing priorities, and make rightful claims and necessary renunciations. We help them develop an ethical flexibility of mind and attitude, knowing when to be a stickler and when to give a wink and a nod, when to finesse a situation and when to play strictly by the rules, when to speak up and when to suck it up.
​
We help people navigate power dynamics, make adaptive distinctions and discriminations, and pick their battles. A psychoanalytic "read" can "pull" for good outcomes and help avoid blunders or traps. We help tame our baser instincts and harness optimal aggression, assertion, competition, intimacy, and sexuality instead of ending up mired in destructive, cut-throat aggression, impotent rage, or dehumanizing sexuality.
​
We help people be patient or impatient as circumstances dictate, suffer appropriately but not excessively, and rejoice to the utmost when warranted. We help people grow, change, integrate, modulate, decrease self-absorption, regard themselves accurately, take themselves seriously but not too seriously, free up emotional energy in the service of creativity and mastery—in short, become their best selves.
​
The reverberations go well beyond the individual, fostering richer and fuller family life, as well as functional and productive organizations, all with enormous ripple effect. Our work can help break the kinds of destructive cycles which, if left untreated, keep echoing through the generations.
​
-from Wendy Jacobson's "Why Bother? A Psychoanalytic Graduation Speech"