Therapeutic Methods

Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

This form of talk therapy explores how the past has affected thoughts, feelings, and actions in the present. Within the context of a close relationship with your therapist, it helps you shift into a more deeply satisfying way of being. It combines well with hypnosis, meditation, and EMDR.

Hypnotherapy and Self-hypnosis

To help a wide variety of people in many different situations, I use hypnosis, a very effective method for enhancing and speeding up a therapy. Hypnosis, or trance, is a state of concentrated attention, similar to daydreaming or absorption in watching a movie or reading a book. When you are in trance and receive a suggestion (either from yourself in self-hypnosis or from a hypnotist), you are more apt to take it in, simply because your mind is so concentrated. But you always maintain control of your own mind and can refuse to accept any suggestion you dislike.

Hypnosis is deeply relaxing, and it helps in managing pain and stress. Like meditation, it accesses the unconscious wisdom we all have within and strengthens our capacity for change. I combine it with visualization and other techniques to help people deal with diverse issues like managing anxiety and depression, increasing assertiveness, enhancing performance, trauma, medical problems, weight control, and stopping smoking. Please check my published articles for more detailed descriptions of hypnosis and how it can help.

Meditation

As part of my practice, I teach you to meditate, which greatly enhances your therapy. Learning meditation enables you to relax and to concentrate more deeply. It also teaches you to understand and manage your feelings. What's more, research shows that the ability to enter a meditative state enables people to minimize depression and anxiety and increase feelings of contentment and well-being. This shift contributes greatly to the therapeutic process.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)....

In an EMDR treatment, you identify a problem, the negative thoughts you carry about yourself, and the positive thoughts you would like to have instead. Then I lead you through a process called bilateral stimulation, a technique for stimulating both sides of the brain. It can include eye movement, tapping each side of the body, or hearing sounds in each ear. This stimulation has an interesting effect: it soothes you and simultaneously enables you to move through emotions and change negative thought patterns into positive ones more quickly than usually occurs in other therapies. Like hypnosis, EMDR speeds up and enhances a therapy. It helps with trauma, performance enhancement, anxiety, phobias and quite a few other difficulties.

Pet-Assisted Therapy

If you wish, my two cats, Boots and Tiger, will join us in sessions. Boots and Tiger are 10 years old and have participated in therapy work since they came to my home at 4½ weeks after being rescued from the street.

As many people know from experience, and research shows statistically, animals greatly enhance human well-being. They provide opportunities for companionship, relaxation, and fun as well as a deep animal intuition that can inspire your own. In therapy sessions, the cats may cuddle or spar with each other, and inspire you to think of your own comparable experiences. They may brush against your feet or, if you wish, sit on your lap and let you stroke them. Their presence helps you relax and become more comfortable with your feelings. Sometimes they inspire ideas and insights. Of course, if you prefer not to have them in the room, I will move them away. Read more about Pet-Assisted Therapy here.