I am open to working with many conditions, including and not limited to anxiety, depression, stress, life transitions, grief, complex trauma, suicidal ideation, chronic pain and chronic illness, LGBTQIA+ related issues, issues related to spirituality, mood imbalances and neurodivergence.
These are a few thoughts that come out of my personal experience.
Grief and Loss
It may feel like the whole of existence, just by being, is telling you to get over it and move on.
As if absence itself were denied everywhere you turned.
It might feel like nothing that is present can reflect the presence that is absent. A missing presence not only beloved but at the heart of reality itself. It might seem impossible for that loss to be real. Or for reality to go on without it.
We can make a place for grief and loss to be. Allowed, present, felt. Everything that connects with it for you can be explored. We can take the time you need to find how those connections lead to new ways of being.
Suicidal Ideation
How many people around you would say, if you told them you wanted to die, or had the thought that you should die, “do you want to talk about it?”
But isn’t that exactly it?
Suicidal ideation is not pointless. It only grows stronger when invalidated.
That thought keeps telling you that life as it is can’t go on. Must not go on. It’s trying to be heard.
We can listen for where that voice speaks from. Go past the relentless repetition to find the meaning it wishes could be received about which life needs to no longer be. Which life can be there instead. The life that has compassion for the life that is saying it needs to end. The life that holds its own end.
An incomplete sentence.
Chronic Illness
Chronic illness is not one thing. If it is bringing you to therapy there may be a multitude of challenges involving, for example,
∆∆∆∆ burdens on relationships, functioning, work, and love weighing heavily on communication and understanding. Sometimes it may simply feel too difficult to try to explain.
∆∆∆∆ the body in pain and dysfunction feeling like an obstacle divorcing you from the life others seem to move through with unthinking ease, placing you in a world apart even while you’re in the midst of others.
∆∆∆∆ the line between your responsibility and what has landed, between your choices and the appearance of an unchosen reality. How do you understand that line, live it, feel it from day to day? How does it relate to the messages you’re getting? How do you relate to the messages you’re getting?
How do you locate where you have the most choice about how you live your condition and cultivate your conscious choices?
Spirituality
You may ascribe to a certain religion or faith or none at all, be devout or questioning, locate yourself anywhere on the rich spectrum of belief systems as yet to be fully catalogued and still developing. In the therapeutic space we can approach your experiences without needing to color within the lines of any particular dogmatic framework. While neither one of us will be without preconceptions, we’ll listen for those preconceptions, question them if the time comes for questioning, ask what they’re doing there.
You may want/need space to process
∆∆∆ limit experiences: unusual, perhaps paranormal, inexplicable, transrational, immersive, boundary testing, world-dissolving, unaffirmed, unrecognized, invalidated by community, wordless
∆∆∆ existential crises: upendings of order, challenges to identity, loss or questioning of purpose and meaning in life, a searching that is entirely new for which you have no playbook
∆∆∆ depression and anxiety related to hopelessness, loss of meaning, a change in state of the divine/sacred/God
How do these experiences connect up with your love and care for others?