Services

Therapy for Individuals

Individual therapy is primarily a service.  You, as the client, come with a goal.  It may be to reduce certain problematic symptoms.  Or it may be to find clarity about feelings of depression or hopelessness.  Or it may be behaviors that cause problems in your relationships.

Other clients come with a desire to be more focused at work–they’ve lost a sense of inspiration in their career and they intuitively know they would be happier if they felt more excitement about their work.

Other clients have tried therapy before, but have felt uncomfortable being diagnosed and treated as a problem.  They know that the long-term solution to their symptoms is deeper and more complex than the simplistic treatments they’ve been offered before.

My approach to individual therapy begins with a focus on your goals.  Therapy is hard work, and it should always be moving you toward what you want.

As we focus on your goals, we create a relationship between us that evokes strength, openness, trust, and flexibility.  The quality of that relationship is essential.  Just as an operating room must remain free from germs, we remain aware of any sense of judgment, shame, frustration, or uncomfortable dynamics.  The relationship of trust and connection does a great deal of the “work” of change.

Another important element of my approach to therapy is the role of your emotional brain.  Changing thoughts and behaviors is important, but the key to creating lasting, structural change is on the emotional level.  This means deeply understanding your emotional responses, and creating new experiences that update your wiring on a fundamental level.  Neuroscience is validating what religious traditions and indigenous communities have known for millenia: transformative change happens when we have significant emotional experiences.

I primarily work with men, and I have worked with a number of medical professionals, artists, small business owners, finance workers, people in academia, and men who work in construction and other trades.  Please contact me if you have questions about whether I would be a good “fit” for your situation.  I promise to be honest with you about my capabilities.

I offer individual therapy on-line or in person.  Sessions can be 50-minutes, 80-minutes, or 110-minutes.  For longer in-person sessions, see “Intensives” below.

Pricing:

50-minute individual session: $155

80-minute individual session: $225

110-minute individual session: $295

Relationship Therapy for Couples

Our primary love relationship can be the most powerful avenue for strength and delight, and it can also be a source of frustration and pain.  In order to change relationships for the better, we need a proven roadmap to make sense of it all.  In Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFT), we use the research-validated Attachment Theory to guide our work, which says that the quality of the emotional bond determines the health of the relationship.

The first step of EFT is to create a safe space in therapy.  Each member of the couple must know that the therapist understands them, understands their intentions, and understands why they react the way they do.  If you’ve had the misfortune to experience couples therapy where you felt “ganged up on,” this will feel very different for you.

Also in EFT, it is important to understand the emotional dynamics of your arguments.  This will be a very different way of looking at your fights, but it’s the only way to truly create structural change in how you relate.

Some relationships are dealing with crisis or betrayal.  If you have an experience where one partner feels their trust has been broken, either recently or in the past, this must be addressed emotionally in order to heal.  Usually when couples try to repair these “attachment wounds” it has not come to a sense of resolution.  EFT provides a roadmap to address the wounds in an honest, productive, and potentially healing way.

To learn more about EFT and our research on relationship improvement, please see the Resources page.

In EFT, we begin with an 80-minute session together, where we discuss the “stuck places,” your goals for the relationship, and we develop a clear picture of how to proceed toward those goals together.  Then we schedule two 50-minute individual sessions where I meet with each member of the couple individually.  From then on, we meet together.

You deserve to know and understand exactly what we’re doing in therapy and why, because if you know why you’re making progress, you are more likely to be able to continue that progress into the future.

Pricing:

Initial meeting, with assessment and planning, 80-minutes: $260

50-minute couples session: $175

80-minute couples session: $260

110-minute couples session: $340

Speaking and Education

It’s my delight to share insights from psychology, therapy, religious studies, and my own experiences with others.  When people invite me to group events, either as a speaker or to conduct a class, it’s an opportunity to create a space where we can all be affected and changed. If you have a group or a class that would enjoy a conversation about the science of truly healthy relationships, working with the emotional brain, becoming your authentic self, the spiritual journey to emotional wellness, or other such topics, please contact me.