22. September 2023

Clients in therapy talk about relationships with partners, parents and children. When someone grows and changes, and begins to do things differently, it affects everyone around them. This means the way forward for you, the individual client having the issue with your family member, is also the way forward for them. I use family systems and developmental models to understand not only your predicament and viewpoint, but also the point of view of your spouse or other family member; my approach...

11. September 2023

One of my specialties is working to heal chronically fractured family systems where all of the family members are adults. Generally speaking the request comes from the younger generation, who respond to one or more aspects of their parents’ behavior with a combination of worry and outrage. Oftentimes present disagreements between family members overlay past hurts and transgressions. As with all interpersonal conflicts, it’s important for me to understand—absolutely—each person’s frame...

11. September 2023

“People travel now much more than ever before” is how I began this blog post in January 2017. As we move into the middle of the 2020s, the observation seems dated. Yet some of us still do travel. I also wrote, almost seven years ago: “Clients and therapists using a telemedicine platform should be aware of the limitations and constraints. In terms of felt effectiveness a teletherapy session may or may not be perceived as inferior to a face to face session.” The intervening years show...

11. November 2017

Who, or what is killing the marriage? When we originally got together as a couple, we loved being together. We understood each other, wanted the same things, enjoyed a healthy sex life, and, perhaps most importantly, had a sense of belonging at home and in bed with this person. Three or four…or seven or eight…or fifteen or sixteen years later, the picture looks very different. We don't enjoy being together; talking is a strain, often leading to nowhere, or to argument; we have stopped...

26. August 2017

Therapy works! In therapy I help you develop your capacity to respond to the world and its demands. Through therapy you increase your sense of freedom, choice, wellbeing and positive experience in relationships; as your development progresses, I am able at different times in your therapy to draw from a different combination of cognitive and psychodynamic models. My intentional, systems approach recognizes that when you change it impacts those around you, and part of our work centers on helping...

12. January 2017

Everyone likes to be pleased. And we all of us put out vibes to others letting them know how it is they can please us. Some of us are very susceptible to the vibes put out by others and we fall into a pattern of succumbing: we give others whatever they seem to us to want from us to make their lives easier. This people-pleasing pattern harms us. Without fully realizing what we are doing we will unquestioningly give others the results they wish. In doing so we may suppress or not even bother to...

14. October 2016

Our development is lifelong. Often, hopefully mostly, we find it in ourselves to rise to life’s incremental, incidental challenges. And from time to time we seek the therapist’s assistance. The purpose of therapy is not to need it. Some clients make good progress in 40, 30, 20 or fewer sessions, and some clients are best served by being in therapy for more than one year. Your progress in therapy and how long you will need therapy will be reviewed regularly between us. We will meet weekly...

12. October 2016

Prospective therapy clients in the San Francisco Bay Area are among the best-informed people anywhere in the world. Counseling and therapy have been embedded in the cultural landscape for decades. But too much information can be bewildering. Especially since there are many different kinds or theories of counseling and therapy and people seem to feel quite strongly about them. The dominant paradigm for helping people with problems used to be psychoanalysis. After WWII things began to change....