Does this sound familiar?

You wake up with feelings of dread or discouragement. At work you’re often distracted from what you’re doing by thoughts of what will happen if you don’t do a good job. You feel badly about yourself because you’re not accomplishing as much as you think you should. You want to do something to make yourself feel better when you get home but the thought that you didn’t get enough done interferes with that. Or maybe what you do to feel better is becoming a problem itself, and causing its own set of troubles. Your relationships aren’t satisfying but you stay in them anyway. Perhaps the dissatisfaction is with your own behavior but you don’t know where to make a change. Even when things seem to be going well you feel empty, inauthentic or disgusted. Things aren’t working out anymore and you don’t know what to do about it because you’ve already tried everything. You have trouble falling asleep or you wake up in the middle of the night and stare at the ceiling, your thoughts going in circles.

As intense as these feelings are they’re not unique to you. Many of us have struggled with them. In a lot of ways our culture promotes just such feelings.

What we know, we can work on. What we’re not aware of can work on us. There is a way to decrease the distress, lessen its impact on your relationships and your work and help you regain control of your life.

A lot of people are skeptical of therapy. You may feel you’ve already tried everything and nothing works. Or that therapy takes too long. Or that you don’t want to go digging around in the past. These are reasonable concerns. But if you’re not aware of what drives you, it may be that what you’ve tried so far has been hit-or-miss—things that are helpful in a general way but haven’t directly addressed the real issue. With a clear goal therapy doesn’t need to be a years-long process, and can be scheduled according to your needs. Having a clear goal gives focus to the work and helps us decide what to examine.

As well as being a therapist I’m a lifelong student of mythology and fairy tales and how they describe psychological processes. This has helped me understand that when things don’t seem to make sense, the sense is often still unconscious. My training, research and practice have shown me the means to bring this sense to the surface, where you can see it, understand it and work with it effectively.

I invite you to explore this site and learn a little more about how I can help you. Some of the pages on coping techniques for various issues might be a good place to start. While these exercises aren’t intended to take the place of psychotherapy with a highly trained and experienced professional they can be helpful in giving you some ideas for basic compassionate self-care.