I provide personality testing with feedback, individual psychotherapy for adults and older teens, and private addiction treatment.
I use personality testing combined with interviewing to get to know you more quickly and to help provide a road map for work you may be starting with me or be doing with another therapist. I use traditional tests like the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and the Rorschach Inkblot Test according to up-to-date methods and findings. I have found that discussing the test and interview results with a client, hearing what a person feels "fits" and what doesn't, is usually a therapeutic experience in itself. Published research has shown that this is therapeutic too.
In my psychotherapy consultations, I look for the approach that fits you, drawing on over 25 years experience post-licensure and a wide range of training experiences. I help people find meaning and greater freedom in their lives through shedding light on unconscious motivations and the influences of early experiences. (In other words, I have been especially inspired by psychodynamic, Jungian, and existential-humanistic thought and research.) I often work with dreams. I have a special interest in the types of consciousness that Jung identified - introversion and extraversion - and in helping people to find a balance in that regard. I look to the unconscious as not only a source of information about past experiences that may be limiting a person, but as a guide to a creative future.
For addiction problems, I help people first of all to establish their own goals with regards to alcohol or drug use, and then to work towards achieving those goals. Some people decide or already know that abstinence is best for them, while others want to moderate their use. I help people to enhance their own motivation to change. In this regard, I have found support and influence in the motivational interviewing approach. Having worked in an outpatient alcohol and drug program for over a decade, I am quite familiar with the issues that people experience in recovery.