LP, 25 years of experience
Hi I'm Christy. Do you sometimes find that you are your own worst enemy? Finding fault with everything you do, never feeling like you're living up to expectations? My goal in therapy is to help you turn your inner critic into a compassionate voice that can comfort you when you're down and give you the inspiration you need to reach your goals. We will work together to help you get to know yourself so that you will be able to care for yourself, identify your strengths, and give yourself the encouragement you need to succeed. I will also help you learn how to be more resilient in the face of obstacles so that you will be better able to find new solutions.
In the first session, I ask the client to tell their story of what brings them to therapy, relevant background history, and strategies that have been helpful and unhelpful. At the end of the session, I ask them what their goals are for therapy and I share my feedback of what I think would be helpful and explain my strategy for how I would help them reach their goals.
As a clinical psychologist, I use a lot of strategies from the field of positive psychology. I focus on a strengths based approach in therapy. I also emphasize using nonjudgmental language. Rather than saying something is right/wrong, good/bad, I conceptualize behavior in terms of what's helpful or unhelpful, wanted or unwanted. Finally, I utilize the research on happiness to create the exercises I teach in therapy.
The clients I am most helpful with are the ones who struggle with parts of themselves that can be overly critical or fearful. Although they know that their thoughts aren't rational, they haven't yet found a way to keep them from interfering with their goals, their desire to connect to others, and their ability to be authentic.
I teach clients mindfulness and self-compassion so that rather than thinking of themselves as someone broken who needs to be fixed, they think of themselves as someone who is hurting that needs to be comforted.
I co-wrote the first edition of the textbook Multicultural Psychology, which is currently in its 4th edition. I'm particularly interested in allowing clients to talk about their ethnicity and experience as an immigrant or having a parent who immigrated to the US and how this impacted their sense of identity and belonging.