How I Work
I'm three things in the room, usually in this order.
Jump to: Cartographer | Negotiator | Anesthesiologist
✵
get a lay of the landCartographer
The first 1-3 sessions with me are usually about building a map of your "system" (what we call your decision making processes). I'm still doing all the usual therapist reflection and warmth, but the reason you come to me in particular is for exceptional pattern recognition. You choose the starting point and the goals.
As you share, I track how your system unconsciously bounces between thoughts, motivations, behaviors. I can spot with speed and accuracy which feelings or defenses are most comfortable for you to express or stay in. It's called mapping because in my head I'm tracking your routes like stops on a map: "Hmm that's the second time he goes to Poundtown via Boundary Falls and his last stop on this journey always seems to be Shame Valley. His system must believe this is the necessary way for a reason. Let's find out what that is. Oh, I see, it's to skip the perilous path through Abandonment Hollow. He never wants to go there again."
You are living a series of intelligent, well-trodden paths your system built from everything it believes keeps you safe. We have to map it out before we can evaluate it.
⋈
broker a treatyNegotiator
Along the way, we usually discover that the part of you that walked in with a goal isn't the only one with a mission. We begin to rethink "stuckness" or "failure" as an internal disagreement between two parts that each want something real.
Imagine one part of you wants to eat healthier. Another part wants to heat up leftovers and lie on the couch to rest. A part of you wants to stay in the long-term relationship, another part's been cataloging every small disappointment in case you need the evidence to leave. A part of you trying to keep your schedule afloat, and a part still processing grief from 2018. A part that wants to be seen, and a part that learned being seen comes with criticism and cruelty. Both sides are right for different reasons. They're just not pulling the same direction.
I've yet to meet a client challenge that isn't some version of an internal war. Usually these parts are exhausted and want a treaty. They just don't know how to write one without help. That's what I teach you: how to broker collaboration by getting under the surface and hearing what each part actually needs from you without overruling the other. Spoiler alert: the tricky bastards almost never state their real needs up front, so it's hard work but it's a skill you carry long after we're done.
Real talk: if I can broker a deal between two executives who've been trying to get each other fired for a decade, I can broker one between the part of you that wants to lie in bed forever and the part that's reading this now. They're on the same team. A lot of the negotiation is just reminding them of that.
⊕
HOLD A SURGICAL BALANCEAnesthesiologist
Sometimes to get parts to work with each other, we support you in doing psychological surgery. These range from outpatient procedures, "fun fact, we're no longer 7 years old," to high-risk operations on major organs, "I know it feels like your heart will die from this grief, but it will not end us, and it will give us a new life on the other side."
My job is precise stabilization of your system: enough agency and consciousness to keep you in charge, enough trust and openness to keep defenses down and change possible. I track how close we can get to buried fears before your nervous system starts to spike, and stay just under that line. This is where most therapy goes wrong. It leans too passive and nothing shifts, or it moves too fast and you lose the patient. This is why many therapists stay in less risky "what happened during your week" territory. It's scary work to effect lasting change, but I'm with you the whole time.
Since I know your system intimately at this point, I keep pace so that all your parts and their needs are heard before each step. Sometimes I'll ask your body a question instead of your head. If a part of you flinches, we stop and figure out what's being protected before we go any further, if at all. Part of you will be impatient for more, but another part of you will feel the subtlest shifts.
—— ✵ —— ⋈ —— ⊕ ——
You in the Center
Three roles, one principle. I'm not the captain, I'm the cartographer. I'm not the CEO, I'm the negotiator. I'm not the surgeon, I'm the anesthesiologist. My job is precision in service of yours. You're the one making the choices. You're the one living the life this work is for. Part of the skill is staying out of the center so you can stay in it.