Treatment for depression, anxiety, Self-development, life changes, grief and loss, parenting, relationship issues, post-traumatic stress, work and professional development, management consultation. The following services are offered:

1. Counseling – this refers to short-term, narrowly focused work toward specific behavioral goals. Clients are given homework in terms of new behaviors to practice, books to read, discussions to have, etc. Sessions are geared towards problem solving and cognitive restructuring. Clients come for counseling when they are experiencing problems in specific areas of their lives, but are functioning fairly well overall. Clients may also come in for counseling as a precursor to doing long-term work.
2. Psychotherapy – this refers to long-term work that requires a commitment to the therapeutic process by both the client and the therapist. The relationship you have with your therapist is the defining space in which change can occur. For this reason, the choice of the right therapist is paramount. While people do make lasting changes through counseling, those changes are brought about “from the outside in”. In psychotherapy change occurs “from the inside out”. While behaviors are attended to, more attention is paid to bringing what is unconscious into consciousness. This is done during the therapy session by attending to thoughts, feelings, non-verbal communication, and physical sensations that are brought about during the discussion. It is done, also, through the use of dreamwork, and sometimes through the use of art or movement. In my work as a psychotherapist I draw primarily from Carl Jung’s theory of the human psyche. In essence, his is a theory of finding balance between the pulls of opposite forces – between goodness and evil, between light and dark, conscious and unconscious. This is, by definition, long-term work. Given the space to do so, the psyche moves toward health and wholeness. The relationship between client and therapist provides that space.
3. Dreamwork – I put this as a separate service because some clients want to come in to focus on their dreamlife, using this as their preferred tool to bring about change. I have been the facilitator of the same dreamgroup for 11 years, with the same participants. I have had the joy of witnessing the growth enabled by using dreams as a focus. I f you’ve always been fascinated by dreams, or if you’ve recently noticed the number of new books on dreaming available at the bookstore, consider trying dreamwork.
4. Management Consultation – Short-term, Goal-specific work which addresses problems inherent in managing people. For example, how to deal with difficult employees, how to teach your team to think for themselves, how to improve moral, boundary problems on the team, etc. Most managers access me through the company’s EAP. If you do not have an EAP, you may contact me directly.
5. Couples therapy – I reserve part of my client time to see couples who are experiencing marital problems and are committed to staying in the marriage. I have a strong commitment to the institution of marriage, particularly if there are children in the home. I am careful about which marital cases I accept, and if I do not think I will be the best therapist for you, I will tell you and refer you to one of my colleagues. If your marriage is one where abuse is present, either physical, verbal, or emotional, I will not conduct couples therapy with you but would be happy to work with either one of you individually.
6. Critical Incident Stress Management – I offer CISM services, using the Mitchell model, both through private contractual arrangements and through several of the EAP companies. I have a broad range of experiences over the past 4 years offering debriefings and defusings after fires, bank robberies, employee deaths and suicides, and other traumatic events. I performed services for local companies impacted by the earthquake in 2001, and by the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001. I strongly believe in the value of this work in reducing traumatic stress symptoms. My fees for this work, when contracted privately, are 100$/hour, including travel time.

I see a limited number of children in my practice. I am a Children’s Mental Health specialist, per Washington state code, and have spent a large part of my career working with children and their parents. I specialize in difficulties of early childhood and attachment and am skilled in helping parents make better parenting decisions.

It is getting harder to find a clinician who spends a great deal of time working with children in private practice. There are good reasons for this. Working with kids is very time consuming for both the parent and the clinician. In addition to seeing the child, one has to see the parents, and generally has to have contact with teachers or daycare providers. Parents may end up paying for many of these services out of pocket, as insurance companies limit the kinds of services they will pay for.

If you have concerns about your child, the intial step to take is to contact me for a consultation. This consultation, which can be done over the phone, will give me an idea of what problems you are having, how long they’ve been going on, what your level of concern is, and what you’ve done so far to rectify the situation. Please call your insurance company before contacting me (see list of questions for insurance company), so that you can readily give me the information about your resources. There is no charge for the initial phone consultation, although I like to limit the time to 15-20 minutes. If I can’t help you, I will try to refer you to someone who can.

If I believe I can help you with your child, we can set up an appointment for the parents to meet with me without the child. I will get a thorough history from you and get more information about what you would like to see happen. Based on the information you give me, I will either set up a session to meet with your child or make arrangements to observe your child in their daytime environment, whichever is more pertinent to the situation.

At the end of this assessment phase, which usually lasts 2-3 sessions, I will meet with you and offer a plan of action. This plan may not even include doing individual work with your child. It might be more focused on giving you the tools you need to help your child yourself.

I do not offer services to children whose parents are going through divorce proceedings, or whose parents are in a custody dispute over the child. Nor do I do forensic evaluations designed to discover whether a child has been mistreated in any way. I do not do evaluations of any kind for legal purposes. If the child has two parents, I expect both parents to participate in the child’s treatment, even if the parents are divorced. If the parents cannot get along enough to participate together, then it is likely that their hostility is causing distress to the child. In this case, the parents need to be in therapy to learn how to put their child’s needs before their own. There are a few exceptions to this policy. If you are unsure about whether I will work with you, please call and talk to me over the phone.