Practice

Therapy often begins with a question—one that feels impossible to answer alone:

How does this keep happening? 

Why can’t I stop (or start)? 

Where does this pain come from? This numbness? This anxiety? 

Why did things unfold this way, lead me to this point? 

And perhaps above all: what would it take to change course—to suffer less, or to enjoy more? 

It is difficult to face thoughts like these in yourself, and more difficult still to share them with someone you don’t know. But the risk is worth taking. Addressing your question to another person, especially one who is trained to listen, opens a space in which your thoughts can echo and shift. When it is spoken—and heard—both the question and the one who asks it begin to change. 

There is relief in the act of putting your uncertainties into words. Taking something formless, at once everywhere and nowhere, and giving it shape, definition, can help you manage it. This is an essential first step. At the same time, and in the same movement, your initial question will join up with others—it will spur associations and generate hypotheses about where it came from, or how you might answer to it. In this way, the effort to articulate your question opens onto far-flung parts of your mind and your history. The first step leads to many more.

As you follow the threads of these questions through your ideas, affects, memories, and dreams, the outlines of a structure will begin to emerge. Certain words will appear with clockwork regularity, punctuating the text of your life. A chance encounter between one idea and another will reveal a rhyme between parts of your existence that once seemed perfectly separate. Through their repetition, their insistence, you might recognize some of these coincidences as nodal points, knots that fasten your way of being. All of a sudden, you may find yourself at a gap in this fabric—on the brink of something that remains unsaid. Together, we will work to say it.

Over time, you will come to assume this strange and singular experience as your own. Beneath the appearance of chance, nonsense, or accident, you will discover a consistency, a style, that is yours and yours alone. Then you will decide what to make of it.

If you are interested in beginning this process, please reach out to me through the contact form below. Initial consultations are free of charge. I look forward to hearing from you.