What is Therapy?
Psychotherapy is a space where individuals can feel free to safely explore aspects of themselves and/or work through intense emotional pain. Therapy can be helpful for achieving personal and professional goals, improving relationships, and processing very difficult emotions.
That said, there can often be a lot of stigma around therapy, and it is completely understandable to come to it with hesitation, anxiety, fear, or skepticism. Psychotherapy can look different and have different expectations, depending on whom you ask. My view on therapy is that it can be what you make it.
There is no reason that is too big or too small, it is personal to you, and our work together is to focus on the goals you want to accomplish in therapy, whether that is to process and heal deep wounds, navigate life challenges, or explore questions about your thoughts, emotions, and actions.
My style is very warm and open, practical, authentic, non-judgmental, collaborative, and flexible. I encourage open dialogue and feedback, in an effort to find the strategies and preferences that are most helpful to you.
What Therapy Looks like
It depends on what you want to work on and your goals. If you have a specific goal, or diagnosis, or target behavior in mind, we can do a short-term limited therapy of 6 - 12 or 18 sessions, using evidence-based approaches. If you have a less specific goal in mind, we can explore and be more open-ended (we don’t have to put a time limit on it).
We tend to start with a session or two of assessment, understanding history, how long you’ve been feeling this way or working through this issue, and then we decide together on goals and approach. It’s collaborative.
My Approach
Individuals have varied reasons for coming to therapy, whether it is exploring unknown aspects of themselves or existential questions, difficulties with work or athletic performance, being in a place of feeling stuck, or struggling with intense emotional pain.
My approach is to meet you wherever you are on your journey, and to work collaboratively to find the best ways forward.
I do so mainly from a relational, attachment-based, and developmental orientation, rooted in a cognitive behavioral approach, drawing also from other approaches that have scientifically shown to be effective with various conditions.
What that means is that I focus first on building trust together, establishing a solid working relationship, deciding together whether I am the right fit for what you want to achieve in therapy, and then utilizing the approach and strategies that are most applicable and relevant. Those are crucial elements for achieving therapeutic goals.
The approaches I draw from are:
CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy)
DBT (Dialectical Behavioral Therapy)
Trauma-informed / evidence-based trauma approaches
Motivational Interviewing
Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) for Couples
Family Systems (EFFT) Emotionally Focused Family Therapy
“I prefer to ask the question of ‘Do I need therapy’ in a different way, and that is ‘could you benefit from therapy?’. When we ask the question, ‘do I need therapy?’ It can feel daunting. It can feel like something you’re forced into. But when we ask, ‘could I benefit from therapy,’ it feels more approachable. It feels like I am making the choice that is best for me, given what I am going through..”
— Dustin Kieschnick, Psy.D.