Areas of Expertise
Solution Focused Therapy
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
Narrative Therapy
Life Coaching
Online Individual and Couples Therapy
Divorce and Custody issues
Children and Adolescents
Expert Witness
My Approach
I combine a few different approaches in order to foster sustained change and personal growth. I also tailor my treatment plan to the individual, as each client is unique and requires a slightly different method. The following psychological theories are among those which inform my work:
Solution Focused Therapy
Future-focused, goal-directed, and focuses on solutions, rather than on the problems that brought clients to seek therapy: the conversation is directed toward developing and achieving the client’s vision of solutions. Solution Focused therapists have learned that all people have previously solved countless problems and probably have some ideas of how to solve the current problem. Once SFT therapists have discovered some previous solutions and exceptions to the problem, they invite the client to do more of what s/he has previously done, or to try changes they have brought up which they would like to try.
Narrative Therapy
The assumption that people experience problems when the stories of their lives, as they or others have invented them, do not sufficiently represent their lived experience. Therapy then becomes a process of storying or re-storying the lives and experiences of these people. In this way narrative comes to play a central role in therapy. Narrative therapy seeks to be a respectful, non-blaming approach to counseling and community work, which centers people as the experts in their own lives. It views problems as separate from people and assumes people have many skills, competencies, beliefs, values, commitments and abilities that will assist them to reduce the influence of problems in their lives. A core principle is the therapist always maintaining a stance of curiosity, and always asking questions to which s/he genuinely do not know the answers.
Social Constructionism
A sociological theory of knowledge that consider how social phenomena or objects of consciousness develop in social contexts. A social construction (also called a social construct) is a concept or practice that is the construct (or artifact) of a particular group. When we say that something is socially constructed, we are focusing on its dependence on contingent variables of our social selves rather than any inherent quality that it possesses in itself. The underlying assumptions on which social constructivism is typically seen to be based are reality, knowledge, and learning.