First, How Psychotherapy Works
It is perfectly natural and also a strength to wonder how psychotherapy can help.
Please take a moment to watch a video about how psychotherapy works from The School of Life in London:
Please take a moment to watch a video about how psychotherapy works from The School of Life in London:
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Depth, Insight and Relationship My approach to therapy is designed to create meaningful change - improvements in relationships, work life, sense of self, self understanding, and capacity to navigate life's ups and downs - to get to the root of oneself and one's struggles, as well as providing symptom relief. My approach is about depth, insight and relationship and is individualized and for the whole person. From my perspective, the quality of the therapeutic relationship is a significant determinant of meaningful psychotherapy. I work diligently with you to first create a secure and unique therapeutic relationship based on complete trust, acceptance, caring, reliability and emotional safety. "Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thought nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away." - Anonymous, Shoshone 
From this caring and secure relationship you are fee to explore with curiosity your experience in more detail and richness than perhaps ever before. You might begin by examining your present state, to know and appreciate how you came to your present state, to finally meet the sources of your challenges and learn, heal, and grow through them and come to terms with your life. You may discover along the way powerful inner resources you were unaware of, learn new skills and tools, and enjoy a lasting freedom and experience of yourself, others and life from an emancipated perspective. "By this expansion of the potential range of experiencing, we would be more open to being touched by the beauty of nature or compassion for another, and more open as well to knowing our own limitations and human brokenness. We would be more self-empathetic, willing to see the truth of our lives, from the mistakes to the successes, from the pains to the joys. Here, no matter what the particular type of experience, we would know: "This is my experience; this is honestly who I am in this moment." - From, "The Primal Wound", by John Firman and Ann Gila 
The Therapeutic Experience So what is the therapeutic experience like? The answer is it's unique for everyone, and we can start where we are. For example, a client may begin a session by exploring and discussing an interpersonal challenge and soon discover parts of themselves that are activated or triggered and reacting with coping strategies that do not reflect the client's full capacities, or reflect missing experiences vital to satisfying life experiences. By exploring in an embodied and experiential way our history, we can unburden ourselves from un-metabolized experience, care for and integrate our disparate parts, and learn new skills and tools. We can then find psychological relief and increase self understanding, empathy for ourselves and others, increase psychological strength, relax our protective processes, and access more fully our authentic self and meet creatively the challenges of life. "We know from the practice of experiential therapy that it is possible to purge from our unconscious undigested memories of emotional and physical pain from our infancy, childhood, and later life by fully experiencing them. This, together with ensuing positive experiences that become available in this process, frees us from the distorting influence of past traumas that make our daily life inauthentic and unsatisfactory." - Stanislav Grof, a Czech-born American psychiatrist and principal developer of transpersonal psychology Our First Relationships Are Key If we were very lucky in our first relationships, our caregivers used their understanding and their loving feeling for us - their empathy - to create a relationship with us where we feel held in emotional safety and acceptance. We were seen, heard, and gotten in a way that gave us a true and authentic sense of ourselves that we feel and know deeply – we know our humanness and we have compassion for ourselves and, therefore, the capacity to know and have compassion for others. "I remember spending time with my grandfather reading books and talking about them with him. He loved that as much as I did. I can hear him deep down in me saying my mind is okay and I can learn anything if I stick with it." - From, "The Primal Wound," Firman, Gila 
Good enough caregivers also model emotions, wise action, and give us rules, tools and ongoing support to learn life’s lessons and grow. Equally important, they model how to repair their relationship with us when they rupture it. From this firm foundation we can eventually move into the world and express our choices from our deepest truths and joys and manage with relative emotional resilience, equanimity, and creativity the challenges that come our way. We are also more likely to recognize others who see us with genuine caring and concern, and we can forge good enough relationships outside our family that continue to nurture our growth, that make us stronger mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Soul Sickness The trouble ensues when our caregivers are not able to provide good enough love, support, safety, and the ways and means to meet life – often because their own caregivers were unable, or the world outside of the family was too challenging. A child in this uncertain environment will likely suffer experiences where they are dropped emotionally. Empathic neglect engenders a dark, menacing, and powerful feeling of emotional anxiety and disintegration – a primal wound to our good sense of self, safety, well-being, and a belief the world will respond to us in a good enough way or that people will repair relational ruptures when they inevitably occur. Many people ultimately know this highly negatively charged feeling as shame, chief among the disturbing inner states that negate a full human life. “Shame is a sickness of the soul. It is the poignant experience of the self by the self, whether felt in humiliation or cowardice, or in a sense of failure to cope successfully with challenge. Shame is a wound felt from the inside, dividing us both from ourselves and from one another.” - Psychologist Gershen Kaufman, 1992 Genesis of Survival Self 
If we are fortunate, our psyche registers our distress and stores it safely in the body, away from our awareness. Psyche then issues forth a protective coping mechanism to the untenable situation. In other words, since our authentic self is unacceptable, psyche creates a survival self that will meet the expectations and needs of those in command of our lives. This rescue comes at the extreme cost of our own true self, but we will be able to find a way forward. And because the whole process happens below the level of awareness, we are unable to perceive that who we feel we are is actually a survival response to unspeakable pain. To a greater or lesser degree, our life choices reflect an anxious, depressed, numb, hungry, and confused sense of survival, rather than an alive sense of authenticity, relative calm, resilience, creativity, and acceptance. “We have all been impacted by non-empathic environments in our lives and so have suffered. This may seem a mild description, given the experience it tries to describe. To say it in another, more experiential way: we have all felt ourselves humiliated, discounted, and used as objects to serve the desperate needs of others; we have all been abandoned, left to disintegrate in the face of unknown horrors; we have all felt the gut-wrenching plummet toward personal non-existence. This may now seem overstated - but not to those aspects of us who bore the brunt of this wounding. And we have all done whatever we needed to do in order to survive such degradation and annihilation - we have developed some amount of survival personality. That is, we have all had the life we were meant to live driven underground; we have all been entranced, brainwashed into forgetting our heights and our depths; we have all been forced to live a pretense, burying our true selves.” - From, "The Psychotherapy of Love", Firman/Gila The Way Out Is In People often access therapy services when the symptoms of survival become more painful or confounding than can be borne. A psychotherapist can offer, perhaps for the first time in one's life, the missing experience of an unconditional, positive and warm presence - a good-enough, skillful, caring, and responsive holding environment, and the ongoing support and tools one needs to find one's own hidden power of will and inner resources for transformation. In this relational and experiential incubator, our awareness can grow alert and strong and begin to explore our complex inner experience and the multiplicity of selves that comprise us. Like the sun gently melting a glacier, our survival self can begin to give way in the light of awareness, and our true self and its creative capacities can emerge. We can draw from the many schools and tools of psychology to cultivate this experience, including somatic work, internal parts work, family systems work, self psychology, dialectical behavioral therapy, and trauma-informed somatic and imaginal self-care strategies to calm our nervous system. And as we gradually dis-identify with survival self, process our forgotten pain with understanding, compassion and skill, and begin to identify with our authentic self, we may find we are finally free to use our will to choose what we really want and need from ourselves, from others and from the world. “There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time. This expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, not how it compares with other expression. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.” - Martha Graham, American modern dancer, and choreographer And If we persist still further in our awareness work, we may eventually come to a deeper realization of ourselves, our life, and existence itself, and thus find joy and happiness simply by knowing our own true transpersonal nature. The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life. - Sir Derek Alton Walcott, St. Lucian Poet, winner 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature Couple Therapy People often seek couple therapy when they are preparing for a deeper commitment or find themselves stuck at an impasse with their partner, which is further exacerbated by repetitive patterns of disappointment and conflict. Whether it be from an obvious relationship rupture, communication challenges, or difference, or something that seems entirely mysterious, couple therapy is a safe place to explore, learn, improve, and heal relationship. My psychotherapeutic work with couples rests firmly on well-established attachment theory and integrates other tried and true theoretical approaches. Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy, The Gottman Method, Imago Couple Therapy, Non-Violent Communication provide us with highly effective and creative modes of connection, habits, and tools that can transform our persistent negative relationship cycles into consistent healing cycles. The way toward emotional safety, intimacy, and joy begins when we learn how to identify, de-escalate, and assess what ails our relationship. As we uncover ingrained problematic relational patterns, we can look deeper and find the underlying emotions that are often driving our difficulties without our knowledge. We can follow those feelings into the past and find their source in our family of origin attachment experiences and release long-held conflicts in a way that not only liberates us individually but also frees us to transform our present relationship in the ways we long for. “Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.” - Rainer Maria Rilke, Austrian Poet and Novelist And if we find by our thorough exploration we prefer to end our relationship, then we are able to complete this poignant process with awareness, respect and confidence. We may also find endings well played are a powerful lesson in how Nature wastes nothing and transforms everything. We are always given a new choice about how we want to be in relationship with ourselves, with others, and with the world around us. "No mud, no lotus." - Thich Nhat Hanh, founder of Engaged Buddhism 
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Issues And Treatment
The following lists give a quick overview of some of the issues I have experience with and the treatment modalities I integrate:
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Issues:
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Integrated treatment modalities:
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