It’s Not About Your Childhood
You may not have had any experience with therapy in the past and think of it as a place where you come once a week to get your recurring troubles off your chest, or you think of a therapist as someone who will interpret for you the causes of your distress originating in your upbringing and your childhood. If you have already been in therapy, that might even have been exactly what you experienced. Although those things are common ingredients of therapy, they are highly unlikely to lead to the transformation you are entitled to expect from it. Sadly, many of my clients have had such disappointments in the past.
Transformation
Because transformation is what my work is about, I don’t restrict myself to providing empathy and interpretation. The core of the work happens in finding the motivation for change and in applying powerful tools and techniques to effect it. Because this demands work and effort on the part of the client, this approach is not for everyone. A non-negotiable part of working with me is the commitment to doing homework in-between sessions. A typical session with me is anywhere between 50 minutes and 2½ hours, and the usual frequency of meeting is once a week. It is clear that less than 1% of the total number of hours in your week cannot produce significant change. Therefore, it is essential to engage in personal practice regularly between sessions.
Intensive Treatment
The therapy sessions themselves can also be intense. Most therapists schedule 50-minute sessions once a week, but there hasn’t been specific research that showed it was the best way to learn or grow. Indeed, experience indicates that intensive treatment (such as sessions of 2½ hours or more) often works far more quickly and can have long-lasting effects. Surprisingly, intensive treatment can sometimes reduce the cost of treatment since the rate of improvement may be much faster. I have sometimes seen clients reach their therapy goals in as few as half-a-dozen sessions, most being extended ones, combined with diligent homework.
Science and Psychotherapy
I pride myself in constantly scanning the field for improvement in tools and techniques. Psychotherapy is still a burgeoning science, and new discoveries about the brain and factors of change are made every day. Although I cannot claim proficiency in the hundreds of tools available in psychotherapy, I have an eclectic enough background to offer a panoply that covers cognitive, behavioral, somatic, mindfulness-based, gestalt, transpersonal and other approaches. Each client is unique, and it is important to find the tools that suit each and every person.
If you would like to know more specifics about what a course of therapy would look like, should you choose to work with me, check How Treatment Works.