LP, 30 years of experience
We come to therapy to understand and solve our most complex personal challenges. When suffering goes deep enough, therapy is an intuitive response to problems that are emotionally complex and cannot be solved by our ordinary methods. Therapy alleviates our isolation by giving us the specialized and dedicated attention of a therapist. Therapy restores or kindles confidence in our ability to make it through difficult times. Lastly, it gives us some emotional distance, some sense of freedom, from the at times consuming turmoil of our personal lives by stimulating a deeper or broader understanding. I am not a passive presence in the room (or on the screen). I listen carefully for understanding and I tend to interact - openly questioning, searching, and challenging. My roots are psychodynamic and comtemplative, though I tailor my work to each client's unique needs. My personal style is warm, open, and engaging. A particular interest of mine is the relationship between psychological growth and spiritual development. As a long time meditation practitioner, I am drawn to ancient spiritual traditions and to how they can inform and deepen our hectic and restless modern lives.
In the first session we are checking each other out to see if the fit feels right. I listen to you tell the story of why you are seeking help. I also inquire of you to get historical and present day context for the issues you are experiencing, and to convey to you that I have heard you and am able to attend to you with effective care. Conversely, I am looking to see how you are attending to me, are you open to my point of view, and to engaging in a process of learning things about yourself that will stimulate growth and maturation?
My biggest strength as a therapist is my seemingly endless capacity to take an interest in the struggles of my patients. By now in my career I have worked with hundreds of people and yet with every single patient I still feel compelled to engage, challenge, understand, and help.
Successful professionals who seek therapy to address specific problems related to relationships and/or feeling stuck or unfulfilled. Spiritual struggles are also a particular interest.
I call myself eclectic because, having practiced psychotherapy for over 30 years, I no longer identify with one or another modality. I use all of my training and experience to match the needs of a patient in any given moment. This always includes me paying attention to and helping patients be aware of the living moment of the session. This also could include looking at the past for clues about the present, or assessing, in collaborative Socratic fashion, the structure of a patient's cognitive/emotional world and how it has and will, if unexamined, continue to result problematic repetitions.
1 rating with written reviews
April 25, 2025
I picked John as my provider from the listing because he is very well educated and has a lot of experience. His bio also didn't just list a couple of modalities that he is trained in as quite a few other listings did. It seemed like so many of the therapists on the listing didn't have very much experience and were very young. John is a mature adult which helps because I am too. He has proven to be a very good fit for me.