Therapy is often imagined as a solely serious endeavor, but our issues can also be approached with humor and lightness.
My therapeutic style is to be warm, direct, and open with my perspective. I value authenticity in my personal relationships and therapy similarly benefits from openness and honesty. I’ll be inquisitive and forward, and it’s reasonable for you to expect an answer if you ask for advice or about my life.
Effective therapy is
supportive and challenging.
You can expect me to notice, inquire into, and say things that you likely wouldn’t hear from other people in your life. That’s the point right? To do things differently. We are shooting for “comfortably uncomfortable”.
Your greater self-revelation will be met with a perspective and specific attention that would be unusual to receive in your “normal” life. Again, that’s the point — if you could get this kind of attention on a lunch date, you wouldn’t be interested in a therapist!
Virtual Therapy
After working in an office for nearly a decade, during the pandemic I switched to virtual therapy. I discovered that many patients enjoyed increased scheduling flexibility and didn’t miss the inconveniences of commuting and parking. Therapy attendance increased, as people were better able to keep more regularity and momentum, making therapy more effective.
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A virtual practice also allows me more freedom and eases scheduling, as a full office-based practice often prevented rescheduling and spontaneous extra or extended sessions. I’m better able to attend to a client’s insight or acute events that benefit from more immediate scheduling vs “waiting until next session”.
In virtual therapy, I also discovered that certain clients benefit from more contact between sessions, because it better suited their style of personal growth or the nature of the therapeutic issue or life concern. Additionally, contact between sessions often accelerated growth, insight and healing.
All of this being said, I sometimes see clients at my home office in Grass Valley, or do extended home-visit sessions when I’m in the Bay Area regularly throughout the year. I also do wilderness therapy or nature therapy.