Alt facts, fake news, contempt for science and expertise, overt hatefulness and vengefulness, and the lucrative business of sowing fear and division flourished.

Recent Supreme Court decisions have abruptly overturned or severely undermined long-settled protections: reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy, the voting rights of African Americans, the authority of the Federal government to enforce environmental protections, and the separation of Church and State. Corporations possess power and rights unavailable to all but the ultra-wealthy.  Protections for the LGBTQ community are at risk. 

If you arrived at my website and kept going, you already know all this.

Many of my clients begin their journey with me expressing feelings of anxiety, anger, powerlessness, depression, and grief — in a word, anguish. When we begin, you may be used to relating to your feelings primarily through avoidance. We humans are incredibly inventive at finding ways to do anything but be present with our feelings: We try to use “logic” to analyze our way out of distress or accuse ourselves of being ungrateful that we suffer less than others. We retreat into powerlessness or numb ourselves with Netflix, food, compulsive shopping, substances, video games, doom-scrolling, or overwork.  

Distress is a normal response to unthinkable losses. Though it’s easy to lose heart, we can find peace and equanimity beneath the storm that rages on the surface.  The goal of therapy is not to get rid of emotional pain, but to transform your relationship to it. The pain doesn’t need to be pushed away, buried, or grasped onto for dear life, as though something more dire would happen if we loosened our grip.  We can rest in awareness of it all.