The grip of anxiety can be exhausting. There is this sense that you are always on edge, or unable to control a steady race of worries and fears. Therapy can help to reduce anxiety as you discover new ways to experience and move through your emotions. But more than symptom reduction, therapy can take us into the hard work of undoing deep seated, even unconscious ways of navigating life that contribute to our anxiety.

I focus on treating anxiety and depression, but with an approach that casts the experience of anxiety or depression not simply as problems to be fixed, but as symptoms of a deeper struggle with either ones direction in life or ability to connect to others, often both.

What is depression? Sometimes it is a heavy sadness, but other times sadness can be absent, and the experience can be like an emptiness, tiredness or a loss of the will to thrive. It can feel like being deeply “stuck,” accompanied bv a lack of caring about oneself or about even getting unstuck.

Much like anxiety (and often depression and anxiety are linked), the focus in therapy is on taking small steps to begin to get unstuck, but more importantly on the deeper work of understanding what both depression and anxiety may tell us about what we are missing in life.

When couples come into my office they present with a range of difficulties, ranging from breakdowns in communication to even deeper hurts and betrayals. Often, at the heart of those difficulties is a longing to connect with their partner and be able to be understood, seen and hopefully also to understand the other.

In couples therapy we will focus on simple skills that will help a couple learn to communicate effectively again, but I’ll also be listening with you for the deeper cycles or traps you and your partner get stuck in, with the goal of interrupting those cycles to find authentic connection.

Connection…and Meaning…these are two pursuits that I’ve thought deeply about, studied, and continued to search after in my own life. Put simply, I’ve come to believe that human beings are at their best when we feel deeply connected to others and when we feel our life is directed toward something we believe in. The two often go hand-in-hand, and one pursued entirely at the expense of the other rarely fulfills us.

And yet, these can often be difficult pursuits. Sometimes we go through a loss of meaning, a deconstruction, along the path to creating meaning. I love helping people with this journey, as it is one I’m on myself.