Hello, my name is Max, and I am an LCSW practicing in and around the Bay Area. I utilize Motivational Interviewing in my practice, a counseling approach centered around facilitating change, specifically helping people who feel trapped in cycles of repetitive behavior break out. While there is never a guarantee of success, it's an effective and evidence-based technique focused on identifying, examining, and extinguishing ambivalence around the motivation for change.

What can clients expect to take away from sessions with you?

It shouldn't be hard to find a good therapist, but that's not the reality many people face. The first session is the most important in the therapeutic process, yet it is also the hardest step for many people to get through. People come to therapy when a particular pain point in their life has become unbearable, a fire that needs to be put out immediately. Finding the right fit in a provider would already be daunting, but it is especially so when your attention is split between managing the crisis that brought you to therapy in the first place and just trying to find some relief. So what is our first session? It's you outlining the pain points that brought you here, and most importantly the things you want for your life but that are made so much harder by those points. We'll establish expectations, and figure out if we'll be seeing each other weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly. Finally, we can get into the work of helping you create the plan for how we deal with those pain points, and keep them dealt with.

Explain to clients what areas you feel are your biggest strengths.

As a provider, I've had a lot of experience with clients who've tried therapy before, and not gotten what they needed out of it. A lot of people come to the first session feeling like their life is on fire, and just want someone to put it out. The friction that many people experience in their first session is that therapy doesn't work like that. We aren't looking to create dependence, to create a system where you need to come back to me to fix the problems every time they arise. The goal of therapy is to build the framework for the mechanism that will eventually help you to deal with the pain points in your life and your relationships, and giving you the skills needed to put them out should they ever spring up again in the future. We're not going to be putting out any fires in session one, we're going to be figuring out if our communication styles are a good fit for doing the work.

About Max Olkowski-Laetz