After practicing for many years in the field, I’m extremely fortunate to find this work so compelling and rich. Patients work hard in therapy and I know it’s often difficult. It requires time, effort, and resources, and it can feel uncomfortable to speak about your life with someone who you do not yet know. This journey involves exploring new feelings, sometimes not yet articulated and digging into messy, conflictual dimensions of ourselves. So what helps? I believe that most patients enter therapy knowing what they need—some patients will tell us and other patients need time to discover it. My job is to listen as closely to the patient as possible to enable each patient to know their needs themselves. I hope that each patient will come away from our work with different tools in hand but at the top of my list are the capacity to be curious, to reflect and the insight to make new choices. These are life long skills to be treasured.
My work continues to evolve. I love learning and find this field immensely gratifying on both an emotional and intellectual level. I admire the hard work that patients do. My patients have been a source of great inspiration to me over the years. For myself, learning from my patients, colleagues and teachers have all shaped me as a therapist for which I’m always grateful.