About Me
About
My Education +
- B.A. in psychology, Harvard University
- M.A. in counseling, Hunter College
- M.S. in psychology, Rutgers University
- Ph.D. in psychology, Rutgers University
- Licensed Psychologist, State of New Jersey
- Certified EMDR Practitioner
- Certified Teacher/Practitioner of Cultivating Emotional Balance (CEB)
About Me & Emotions +
- The scientific study of emotion really grabbed me while I was at Rutgers in the 1980’s, and it’s stuck with me throughout my clinical training and practice.
- As I think about and try to help clients feel better, I find it useful to work with a small set of basic, universal emotions, each of which evolved in animals and humans to help us solve specific survival problems quickly and effectively.
- And, while the set of basic emotions is small, the variations on them are endless, so, like snowflakes, no one emotional experience we have is exactly like any other.
- Using our highly evolved brains’ sophisticated tools allows us to be conscious of our emotions, and to wonder, often with great frustration, why we are feeling them.
About Me & Mindfulness +
- I learned basic mindfulness techniques informally from a colleague in the 1970s.
- I put them to effective use managing my own anxiety, especially around air travel.
- Mindfulness has been an important part of my spiritual life for many years.
- I regularly use mindfulness techniques with clients to help them manage strong feelings and to work through trauma.
- I’ve attended conferences on using mindfulness as part of psychotherapy, and have participated in a number of silent retreats.
-
CEB
teacher training included extensive instruction in how to teach
mindfulness practices to others developing my own regular
mindfulness practice, and learning
About Me and Psychotherapy +
- A lot of the issues that bring my clients to therapy are problems with their emotions: they find themselves caught in their grip, they often feel very uncomfortable as a result and don’t know why they’re feeling what they’re feeling, and they try a lot of (frequently maladaptive) strategies to help them feel less uncomfortable.
- My areas of expertise include depression, anxiety, and relationship issues. I'm also interested in women's issues and assertiveness. I tailor therapy to each individual client, rather than taking a "one size fits all" approach. So, with one person, therapy might focus on solving some current problem or crisis, for another it might be learning stress management techniques, and for another it could be working to resolve issues and trauma from earlier in life. Most often, it's a little, or a lot, of all of these things.
- Your relationship with your therapist is an important part of your transformative process, so I encourage you to find the right person for you by paying attention to your gut feelings and listening to them. However, even in a good working therapeutic relationship, sometimes there are bumps in the road, and I want my clients to feel that they can talk to me if they feel something’s not right between us. Not only am I human, which is to say not perfect, but it turns out that these moments of tension and difficulty can provide really important opportunities for growth and change.
- All that being said, right now I am not taking many new clients.