General practice guidelines

We see individual clients, and couples.

Individual work with adults

Our general approach is to help clients access difficult emotions that may have seemed too powerful to be experienced in the past. Some times that involves building skills and capacity to help clients stay grounded and feel in control in spite strong feelings. Often accessing emotions means getting into the bodily experience of the feeling and experiencing it while addressing the fear or shame that may have kept the sadness or grief locked away. We do not see our role as having simple answers or advice for clients. Rather, we want to help clients know themselves and their own minds more fully.

Who do we specialize in working with? That’s a hard question. We have particularly enjoyed working with writers, artists, musicians and those in helping professions. But we have loved working people in the service industry and many walks of life.

We work with clients struggling many things including trauma, addictive behaviors, acting out, relationship issues and loneliness.

Children and adolescents

We work with children ages 16 and above. Depending on the person, we tend to use some Dialectal Behavior Therapy skills with adolescents. But our first goal is to build a relationship with the client and develop some kind of shared goal that they care about. We aim to keep a degree of privacy about our therapy. However, we will contact caregivers when issues of safety arise.

Couples work

Creating and maintaining a relationship that works takes time and energy. Often, couples get stuck in an unsustainable pattern. For example, raising children becomes the focus of the marriage, and a couple starts to feel disconnected. The partners stop talking, stop being sexual, and don't make time for each other.

Having a therapist wade into the muck of what cannot be discussed or dealt with can allow the relationship to evolve and grow. Most people in relationships want something similar such as intimacy, support, and to feel free to pursue their own happiness.  Our basic understanding of how couples work comes from a model called Emotion Focused Therapy created by Dr. Sue Johnson.

Group work

Joel has facilitated a long term men’s group for about 5 years that recently ended. It’s possible we would start a new group. If you are interested in group work, let us know.