Practices & Policies
Some key core values inform me, both as a counseling professional and as a person.
To build a transformative therapeutic relationship, rapport, respect, commitment, and mutual engagement is required. Together we will work hard toward your counseling goals. Our solid working agreement acts as a dynamic foundation that protects and stabilizes our work together, and carries it forward.
I value the therapeutic relationship. This means that more than techniques, models of change, or theories, I prioritize our ongoing professional relationship as the primary vehicle through which counseling effectively works. To carry its weight and to produce results takes a commitment to build a healthy professional relationship with significant investment of time, energy, resources, and a willingness to navigate challenges that inevitably arise as we touch into tender and tough topics.
As a counseling professional, I see my role as a combination of witness, confidante, and encourager, someone who helps you clarify, consolidate, and build confidence, someone who walks alongside your path and facilitates your alignment into higher truth, goodness, and the beauty of your life's expression, getting to deeply know, believe in, support, and hold compassion for you as a unique, individual person, with both gifts and personal struggles. Over time, we will become a more powerful, effective team, helping you cultivate self-understanding, self-acceptance, self-improvement, and self-care.
I value patience. Culturally, our desire for a quick fix and ultimate convenience is on the rise, making psychotherapy old-fashioned in our contemporary context, representing a minority value. I am here to protect and nurture it as a valuable tradition and technology of personality development and integration. It is a long-standing process that cannot be hastened. There are no short-cuts that don't compromise the route to deep, lasting change, especially change in our deep-seated habits and emotional lives. Therapy also doesn't proceed in a linear, step-by-step fashion: it requires tolerance for organic development that eventually gets you to exactly where you need to go and what you need to deal with in order to heal and to grow. That being said, I am also committed to discerning wisely the difference between such natural, spontaneous insight and healing, and "spinning in circles" or "getting stuck", and will shed light on and gently intervene when I believe the latter to be happening.
I value our standing appointment. Carving out time for you and I to meet regularly is respected through preparations between our meetings and by upholding my commitment to you by showing up and showing up prepared. I have a firm cancellation policy that requires more than 24 hours notice be given if you are to not incur a cancellation fee (equal to my session rate). I expect that in being a good fit working together that this is understood and I expect you to uphold our agreement rather than lead with excuse or wanting an exception. Repeat cancellations of any nature will be discussed and addressed, as this can easily become disruptive to our work together, to time I have available in my schedule for others, and for protecting my own work/life balance.
I value ongoing assessment.
As a counseling professional, I see my role as a combination of witness, confidante, and encourager, someone who helps you clarify, consolidate, and build confidence, someone who walks alongside your path and facilitates your alignment into higher truth, goodness, and the beauty of your life's expression, getting to deeply know, believe in, support, and hold compassion for you as a unique, individual person, with both gifts and personal struggles. Over time, we will become a more powerful, effective team, helping you cultivate self-understanding, self-acceptance, self-improvement, and self-care.
I value patience. Culturally, our desire for a quick fix and ultimate convenience is on the rise, making psychotherapy old-fashioned in our contemporary context, representing a minority value. I am here to protect and nurture it as a valuable tradition and technology of personality development and integration. It is a long-standing process that cannot be hastened. There are no short-cuts that don't compromise the route to deep, lasting change, especially change in our deep-seated habits and emotional lives. Therapy also doesn't proceed in a linear, step-by-step fashion: it requires tolerance for organic development that eventually gets you to exactly where you need to go and what you need to deal with in order to heal and to grow. That being said, I am also committed to discerning wisely the difference between such natural, spontaneous insight and healing, and "spinning in circles" or "getting stuck", and will shed light on and gently intervene when I believe the latter to be happening.
I value our standing appointment. Carving out time for you and I to meet regularly is respected through preparations between our meetings and by upholding my commitment to you by showing up and showing up prepared. I have a firm cancellation policy that requires more than 24 hours notice be given if you are to not incur a cancellation fee (equal to my session rate). I expect that in being a good fit working together that this is understood and I expect you to uphold our agreement rather than lead with excuse or wanting an exception. Repeat cancellations of any nature will be discussed and addressed, as this can easily become disruptive to our work together, to time I have available in my schedule for others, and for protecting my own work/life balance.
I value ongoing assessment.
the value of long-term therapy
basic agreements
transparency, teamwork, and ongoing assessment
basic commitment