The filters I’ve described each come with a repertoire of techniques, and I work with the broad range of issues. I will describe some of them here.
Living Life On Purpose. My practice is in an affluent community, and my clients tend to be intelligent, articulate, people, with a strong drive for and value on a quality life for themselves and their families. These clients engage around the expectation to feel fully engaged and happy in life, or around seeing their children are on a positive path of development. Often this work achieves the alleviation of the difficulty that the client came in with, and moves into a deeper inquiry of Purpose, an expanded consciousness, and a cultivation of groundedness and opening of the heart. It is a tremendously fulfilling part of my work to see someone gifted, find their way to opening to those gifts and living in full Vitality from the cultivation and expression of those gifts. I see my clients come into their excellence in career or academic performance or passion, I see them living from good-heartedness and generate good-heartedness in their relationships.
Anxiety and Depression are the aspects of our experience that behooves us to develop mastery over, in whatever context they are showing up in. They are experiences of trapped or twisted energy, and we can learn how to transform energy from a negative state to a positive one.
Loss, Grief, Caretaking a loved one, dealing with cancer or other life challenging illness, are some of the experiences that are too big to hold on our own. When you engage me in holding it with you, the Love that is embedded in these experiences is able to surface and light the Way of the turning point you are in. The possibility is of a profound experience of becoming who-you-are-here-to-be.
I treat trauma in its varying faces: PTSD, panic, rage, operating narcissistically, paranoia, anxiety and depression.
Addiction in its faces: alcoholism, adult child of an alcoholic, eating disorders, gambling, drug addiction. Anger management, blame, and rigidity, are often symptoms of an addictive process, regardless of whether the person has a specific object of his addiction, something the 12 step movement recognizes in its jargon of the ‘dry drunk’.
No symptom belongs in any one category. Compulsions of all kinds might be worked with through an understanding of the addictive process, or as an expression of anxiety or trauma, or as part of someone’s tempermental wiring. The range of compulsions is broad from the ‘Delicate cutting‘ in middle & high schoolers, to trichotillomania & other self-mutilation, to sexual obsessions to OCD to ODD.
Children’s symptoms are often unconscious communications; in the work with me, what is being expressed is made conscious, and the child’s needs validated, that the child and I might work towards a more effective way to take care of his needs, and a way of expressing them that is more likely to be received by his parents and others. Other childhood issues are part of a child’s unique wiring. Usually, symptoms are a confluence of both his wiring and what needs to be expressed and understood. ADHD, ODD, Anxiety, Depression, Conduct Disorder, difficulties relating socially, difficulty with academics, inability to concentrate, grief, impulse control, anger management, are some of the more common issues children need help with.
Adolescents are in a developmental period of heightened inspiration and genius, but without the groundedness of experience or value on mentors, that allow our gifts to generate new realities. The work is to harness the energy of the teen’s emerging views, while helping him cultivate the skills, including relational skills, to make decisions that create his life around what really matters to him, and as an expression of his gifts.
Couples come in to work on their relationship. Through the varying marital issues, the work involves healing the injuries to trust within the couple, and finding a way for the offerings of each to be honored in their connection. There are principles of the masculine and feminine polarities of energy (present in all of us), and how they work to create and sustain ‘spark’ that I help the couple to understand. Ultimately it matters that each relinquish a value on ‘being right’ for one on ‘being responsive’ to arrive at intimacy, and the quality of being each other’s best friend.
Domestic Violence and Child Abuse and Neglect present family in a context of unsafety, and is distinct from family as a safe place. The work involves an intimate understanding of who in the family is safe, and what resources there are to protect from harm, and to create more safety. The work with children needs to support their access to safety. The work with the safe parent involves an understanding of resources, within the family’s extended relationships, and in more formal settings such as DV centers, and within the legal landscape. There are often harmful contradictions in the way DV is treated by the DV, mental health, and trauma fields and how it is handled in the family court. The more aware one is of these contradictions, the better armed one is for navigating what is a treacherous path on several dimensions.