For more than 20 years, my practice has concentrated on developing the most advanced, empirically based methods for:

• Couples Therapy - helping couples repair their obstacles to intimacy and create stronger, safer, responsive connections;

• Family Therapy - assisting families in resolving a wide array of problematic behaviors and relationship ruptures to develop satisfying attachments and promote the healthy development of children

• Individual Therapy - working with individual adults and adolescents on problems that significantly affect their lives and block attaining important personal or professional goals

What Can Couples Therapy Do?
 
Couples Therapy can help you and your partner sort out your problems and build a stronger relationship. Whether you are in the middle of a crisis, going through a difficult transition, or discovering unlikable behaviors about each other, couples therapy can be a tremendous source of support and growth. Having a highly trained, objective third party helps you work through anger, resentment, hurt and disappointment. Seeing couples emerge from a difficult situation feeling more connected, intimate and committed than they ever thought possible is very gratifying.

Couples therapy is designed to increase your accessibility and responsiveness to each other. It expands your knowledge about yourself, your partner and the patterns of feeling/thinking/interacting that create conflict, fear, insecurity and distance in your relationship. Couples frequently get stuck in self-reinforcing patterns that severely restrict their openness to each other—fighting or withdrawal often prevail. Connection and warmth seem fleeting. In couples therapy, you can learn to:

• Create a more secure connection, which makes it safer for your true self to be seen and heard, as well as restore trust that has been eroded.

• Develop a better repair mechanism to resolve old issues from the past and more effectively work out present or future issues.

• Expand your ability to positively nurture your relationship in a variety of ways (verbal/nonverbal/physically) and be a better friend and lover to your partner.

• Increase your ability to express your voice in the relationship, even when it feels risky.

Simply put, couples therapy should help make crystal clear:

• The kind of life and relationship you want to build together

• The kind of partner you aspire to be in order to build the kind of relationship you want to create

• Your individual blocks to becoming the kind of partner you want to be

• The skills, knowledge and emotional safety necessary to be successful in achieving and maintaining the above.

Why Couples Therapy?

Intimate relationships are challenging, especially with respect to sustaining intimacy over the long haul. Marital distress is the single most common reason people seek any type of therapy. It undermines family functioning and is strongly associated with depression, anxiety disorders and substance abuse. A satisfying intimate relationship is a powerful antidote to stress, isolation and unhappiness. Couples therapy is much more effective than individual therapy when the key presenting problem is focused on relationship distress.

How to Get the Most Out of Couples Therapy?

1. Focus on Changing Yourself Rather Than Your Partner
    
   Couples therapy works best if you have more goals for yourself than for your partner. The hardest part of couples therapy is accepting you will need to improve your response to a problem (how you think about it, feel about it, or what to do about it). Very few people want to focus on improving their own responses. It’s more common to build a strong case for why the other should do the improving.
   
   You can’t change your partner. Your partner can’t change you. You definitely can influence each other. Becoming a more effective partner is the most powerful way to change a relationship.
    

2. Risks vs. Rewards
   
   To create the relationship you really desire, there will be some difficult tradeoffs and tough choices for each person.
    

   • TIME - It takes time to create a relationship that flourishes: time to be together, to play, to nurture, to hang out, to plan, to share with your family, and so on. This time will encroach on some other valuable areas of your personal or professional time, so be prepared. In all these areas, there is generally a conflict between short-term gratification and the long-term goal of creating a satisfying relationship.

   • The blunt reality is that, in an interdependent relationship, effort is required on the part of each person to make a sustained improvement. It is like pairs figure skating: one person cannot do most of the work and still create an exceptional team.

   • ACTION - Change occurs faster when partners are prepared to take risks of trying to interact differently outside the session. Often it will feel safer to talk about the tough issues in the protected context of therapy. The more you are willing to use your new insights by putting them into action, the more rewarding the changes in your marital dance.

   • Effective change requires insight plus action. Insight without action is passivity. Action without insight is impulsivity. Insight plus action leads to clarity and power.
      

What is Family Therapy?

 
Your family can be your greatest source of support, comfort and love. But it can also be your greatest source of pain and grief. Families can be torn apart by illness, divorce or other problems that create conflict and stress. Family therapy can help families resolve problems in a safe context.

 
Family therapy is a method of psychotherapy based on understanding and treating emotional problems and personal crises by working with the entire family rather than the individual. Therapy sessions focus on recognizing each person’s thoughts, feelings and behavior within the context of their families. You will examine your family's ability to solve problems and express thoughts and emotions. You may explore family roles, rules and behavior patterns in order to spot issues that contribute to conflict. Family therapy will help you identify your family's strengths and weaknesses. The goal is to harness and strengthen family resources, and help family members work collaboratively toward more effective solutions to their problems. Family therapy can help your family weather the storm and develop new emotional muscles to prevent future ruptures.

 
What Kinds of Problems Are Treated by Family Therapy?

 
Family therapy helps families with a broad spectrum of problems including, but not limited to, school difficulties, childhood and adolescent troubles, divorce, life cycle changes, bereavement, learning disabilities, family violence, substance abuse, child abuse and incest, chronic medical illness, eating disorders, and depression. Family therapy may be the treatment of choice for a problem or it may be an addition to other types of individual treatment

 
What Will Our First Family Therapy Session Be Like?

 
Just as all families are different, each family's first session will differ. However, in general, it is customary for everyone living in the household to come to the first session. I will be interested in having all of you talk about your problems, how they developed, what you have tried to do about them, and what changes you would like to see happen. I will also give you feedback about how I understand your family and set a specific plan for treatment. Future sessions may include the entire family or different combinations of family members depending on the goals.
 

What Kinds of Problems Do You Treat With Individual Therapy?

 
Some clients seek help for specific symptoms such as depression, anxiety and panic, eating disorders or substance abuse. Some struggle with adjustment problems following losses such as death, divorce, unemployment or illness. Still others look for help sorting out troubling issues of ambivalence or dissatisfaction in facing life’s many choices.

 
What Type of Individual Therapy Do You Practice?

 
I use an integrative approach to psychotherapy that combines the best aspects of attachment based, interpersonal, emotion focused and cognitive behavioral therapies into a cohesive model. The therapy is focused more on the present than on a lengthy exploration of the past. It is important first to understand you in the context of your current developmental stage and early attachment history. Then, I try to quickly translate the important historical contributions as to how you may seem stuck in your life currently. Developing a clear vision of the kind of life and relationships you want to create is also a crucial step in focusing the goals of therapy.

Emphasis is placed on your internal experiences of feeling and thinking especially in the context of your interactions with others. Identifying core patterns or themes which contribute to self-defeating ways of thinking, feeling or behaving is the next stage in developing healthier alternatives to replace them.

Simply put, individual therapy should help make crystal clear:

• The vision of the kind of life and relationships you want to create

• The kind of person you aspire to be in order to build the kind of life you want to create

• Your individual blocks to becoming the kind of person you want to be

• The skills, knowledge, emotional safety and increased comfort with taking risks necessary to be successful in achieving and maintaining the above.

How Often Do I Need to Come to Therapy?

 
Most people come once a week for sessions which last 50-60 minutes. In some situations, it is more effective to meet more intensely at the outset. The length of time in treatment varies according to the severity of the problem and the particular goals an individual wants to attain. This will be discussed at the initial visit.

What if I Need Medication?

 
As a psychologist, I do not prescribe medication, but we have three psychiatrists in our office who are all well-trained and experienced in evaluating and prescribing psychopharmacological medications for depression, anxiety, panic, obsessive compulsive disorders, etc. This allows me to easily coordinate the management of medication with ongoing psychotherapy.