What I Talk About When I Talk About Therapy

Therapy is often more helpful than people realize. You can think about something a million times or carry a feeling around for years, but something different happens when you actually talk about it with another person. By hearing yourself say things you’ve only ever thought or felt, you can make a connection you hadn’t noticed before. Sometimes another person hears something in your story that you couldn’t hear on your own.

I think there’s a reason for that. We’re social creatures. We need other people—not just to get through hard things, but to understand ourselves. And at a time when technology gives us more and more ways to interact without actually being with one another, I think there is something particularly valuable about sitting across from another person and talking.

Therapy with me starts with what brought you in, but it doesn’t necessarily end there. Grief, aging, anxiety, unexpected left turns, retirement, regret, relationships, and life transitions can bring up bigger questions about who we are and how we want to live.

I practice from an existential perspective, which means I’m interested in the parts of being human that we can’t always fix or avoid: uncertainty, loss, choice, responsibility, relationships, and mortality. We’ll pay attention to what’s happening right now, while also looking at the history and patterns that helped get you here.

Existential Therapy in a Nutshell

Existential therapy starts with a pretty simple idea: being human is complicated. We have to make choices without knowing exactly how things will turn out. We lose people. We get older. Relationships change. We wonder whether the life we're living is actually the life we want. Sometimes we have to live with questions that don't have answers.

Those aren't necessarily problems to solve. Sometimes they're things we need to face and figure out how to live with. That's where existential therapy comes in.

Existential therapy looks at what’s happening in your life, how you make sense of it, and what choices you have—even when the choices aren’t ideal. It asks what you can change, what you can’t (or won’t), and what you want to do with what you’ve been given.

We can pay attention to the symptoms, but we won't stop there. We'll also look at your relationships, your choices, your history, and the larger questions your symptoms may be bringing to the surface.

Sometimes the life we thought we were going to have turns out to be different from the one we actually have. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do. It means figuring out how we want to live with what is true.