“The best way out is always through.”
– Robert Frost
Understanding Depression and Anxiety
Depression and anxiety are common mental health conditions that can affect anyone, regardless of age, gender, or background. They often co-occur – you can think of depression and anxiety like siblings, as they share certain attributes, and sometimes one is more prominent than the other.
Depression is often characterized by feelings of sadness, loss of interest in activities that are usually pleasurable, and lower energy, motivation and self-esteem than usual. While some people experience depression cyclically and more severely, most everyone experiences depressed feelings at some time or another. Depressed feelings can emerge in the context of romantic, family, or friend relationships, grief or loss, a big life change, the stresses of balancing work and parenting, life transitions, feeling stuck in one’s career or unfulfilled by work, medical illness and chronic pain, and many more.
Anxiety is a natural, physiological response to stress or danger. Everyone feels a certain amount of anxiety (worry, concern, stress), and some levels of anxiety can be motivating. But when anxiety becomes excessive and uncontrollable, it can interfere with productivity, fulfillment, and your ability to enjoy daily life. Anxious feelings can emerge in the same contexts as depressed feelings.
The exact causes of depression and anxiety are not fully understood, but in therapy, we examine and consider how a combination of factors, i.e., genetic, biological, environmental, and psychological, impacts your experience and expression of depressed and anxious feelings.
My Approach
I am glad that you are here. If you find yourself overwhelmed, stuck, or struggling, you don’t have to be alone in your experience. I offer an active, evidence-based approach to working through life’s challenges with compassion and humor.
My goal as a psychotherapist is to help you understand your difficulties and empower you to live life to your greatest capacity. My approach is warm, collaborative, and practical. It combines problem solving with a nuanced grasp of the conscious and unconscious, and the complex historical and current life factors that contribute to each client’s challenges. I integrate “psychodynamic” (i.e., insight-oriented), cognitive-behavioral (CBT), mindfulness, and attachment-based psychotherapies. I do so with kindness, light-heartedness, creativity, and humor. I create a safe, non-judgmental, and trusting therapeutic atmosphere where you can freely express yourself.
The Therapeutic Process
“Every human being has the freedom to change at any instant.”
– Viktor Frankl
What to Expect
I will help you learn more about yourself and your relationships, and develop practical interventions to help you live a more productive, compassionate, and fulfilling life. I value the process of getting to know you as fully as possible. In my experience, the therapeutic relationship is a powerful and active agent for change. You can expect me to be active, curious, supportive, and compassionate. I ask questions, listen, and give feedback, thinking out loud with you and sharing my thoughts and feelings with you in real time. You can expect to feel that we are a team (just as I offer feedback, I elicit it from you too), and that I am on your side.
Over the course of therapy, you will develop insight into who you are and how you came to be, what patterns of thoughts/feelings/behaviors work for you now and which patterns used to work but are no longer adaptive, and you will become more aware of the moment-to-moment thoughts and feelings that impact your behavior, so that you can make more active choices in the present about how to respond to your thoughts/feelings/behaviors and make active change.
Is Therapy Right for You?
If you’re battling persistent feelings of sadness and anxiety or struggling to cope with the demands of daily life; therapy might be the answer. With therapy, you have a supportive outlet to process and understand your feelings by means of making changes that will impact your quality of life.