New to Grow
Hello! My name is Benjamin. I'm located in Northern California and serve clients across the state through teletherapy. My approach with clients focuses on creating goals, building hope, and embracing the uncertainty of change. I have extensive experience in schools with teenagers and parents, as well as adults experiencing difficult transitions. I specialize in working with mood disorders, grief (especially child and adolescent grief), learning and neurodevelopmental disabilities, and parenting issues. I also work with teens and young adults experiencing early psychosis.
In our first session together, here's what you can expect
Goal-setting is crucial to effective treatment. So, from the first session I focus on building a shared vision of recovery, change, and growth, guided by what you want from therapy. Many of my clients start therapy with tremendous uncertainty, and that's okay! Sometimes, the best goals start out as a guess or an intuition. So, whether you have a clear long-term goal, educated guess, intuitive sense, or complete uncertainty, my job in our first session is to help you find a direction for therapy.
The biggest strengths that I bring into our sessions
The goals and directions of therapy change constantly. The strength of my approach is its flexibility to adapt treatment to your unique needs. Truly, each and every client teaches me something new. I prioritize requesting your honest feedback to hold myself accountable for providing the highest quality of treatment. Finally, I am relentless in learning, researching, and consulting with other professionals to meet the needs of all my clients.
The clients I'm best positioned to serve
How much are you willing to change? How deeply do you want things to stay the same? Both change and stillness are crucial to our lives, but the willingness to question both are essential to success in therapy. In times of tremendous struggle, we know that something in our life needs to change. We may have a hazy idea of the direction we need to travel, or we may feel completely lost and hopeless. My work centers on cultivating hope, even when that hope seems naive or impossible. Some need a map, others need a compass, and some need to wander. I am especially helpful for people seeking deep, transformative change, with the understanding that such transformation takes time and effort. Wherever you find yourself, my work is to walk alongside you as a fellow traveler, providing both comfort and challenge when you need it. My most successful clients learn to trust the process―and with time, to deeply trust themselves.
Person-centered (Rogerian)
You are the expert of your own life; my role is to support your journey. I use a person-centered approach that draws out your inner capacity for insight, change, and growth. I actively invite and value your feedback about our work together, because therapy is most effective when it feels collaborative and responsive to your needs. I believe meaningful change happens when people feel genuinely heard and accepted, allowing natural growth, insight, and self-trust to emerge.
Acceptance and commitment (ACT)
Making decisions and taking action is much clearer when we know and live in our values. I use core principles and approaches from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), which focuses on defining valued behaviors, opening up to unpleasant feelings, and embracing the present moment through mindfulness.
Mindfulness-Based Therapy
Our minds are built to wander and worry. Mindfulness is a set of practices―and eventually a skill of the mind―designed to overcome these painful mental habits. The goal of mindfulness practices centers on fully embracing both the joy and the suffering of our lives. For some people, mindfulness is central to their spiritual and religious life. Through many different meditation and daily life activities, I have found that mindfulness can provide clients with a powerful tool for clients to attain their treatment goals.
Cognitive Behavioral (CBT)
Understanding the connection between thought, feeling, and behavior is central to my work with clients. When we don't understand this connection, we can think and act in ways that are deeply unhelpful to ourselves and those around us. I have specialty experience in applying CBT and exposure therapy to adults experiencing severe mental illness, such as early psychosis. For interested clients, my approach is heavily focused on real-life experimentation.