FAMILY THERAPY

Long before I became a psychologist, I was riveted by the bold experimentation that marked the early years of family therapy. Family therapists asserted that we are not individuals in isolation. We are also not people whose development ceased in childhood. Instead, we are instead shaped in an ongoing way by our relationships, our communities and our cultures. The focus of my family work currently is on parents and their adult children trying to improve relationships. I trained extensively in family therapy, including an internship at the California Pacific Medical Center Family Therapy Clinic in San Francisco, and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Mental Research Institute (MRI) in Palo Alto, one of the founding sites of family therapy. I also taught family therapy for six years at the California School of Professional Psychology in San Francisco, and taught in a postgraduate family therapy program in the Bay Area. 

COUPLES THERAPY

I meet with couples at various point in their relationship, from those locked into adversarial habits, to couples of long-standing who find they’ve drifted into parallel lives. I also work with couples trying to decide whether to separate or to renew a commitment to each other. These widely varying moments require flexibility and nimbleness on the part of the therapist.  

I don’t believe destructive interactions should simply find another home in the therapy room, so I am active in trying to generate a conversation that is constructive. Ideally, I believe couples therapy provides an opportunity to experience our partner in a way that elicits a quality of empathy. In addition to witnessing accounts of pain, I see it as vital to listen for “counter-stories” within relationships that indicate connection and hope. While these moments may be fragile and easily dismissed, I view them as vital to contributing a pathway out of conflict and distance. I am influenced by John Gottman’s contributions toward noticing and dis-arming destructive relational patterns, as well as his work on eliciting “dreams within conflict.” I also admire Sue Johnson’s pioneering work on the healing power of relationships when secure connections are created between partners.

CONSULTATION/SUPERVISION

I consult with therapists around “stuck” situations in their work, as well as assisting them to inhabit the skills and values they are cultivating in their work as a therapist. I taught supervision to graduate students in the San Francisco Bay area for a number of years, and provided “live” supervision in several settings, as well as more traditional one-on-one supervision to graduate students. Many of my views about supervision appear in a 2014 article I published in the Journal of Systemic Therapies, titled “Negotiating power relations on the threshold of supervision.”