HOW I PRACTICE AS A THERAPIST  
I am not a passive therapist.  I like to interact with my clients.  I will offer advice if I think it is appropriate to do so, but I am also a client directed therapist.  I do not presuppose that I know my client’s better than they know themselves.  I see my job as helping people discover what their personal truth is.  The hardest person to be honest with is oneself.  Once that is achieved then I believe one can begin to be honest with others.  If psychotherapy is not about personal honesty, it is not psychotherapy in my opinion.  

I use three different modalities of therapy; individuals, couples and families.  The chronological order of life is to go from the individual, then to the couple, and finally on to the family.  When I do therapy I see myself operating in reverse, in the sense that I treat families in terms of the parents, couples in terms of the individual and individuals in terms of the families from which they have come.  I see change resulting from reassessing the assumptions made about the self, couple or family from the previous stage.  I see people as having survived difficult emotional situations in their lives by establishing survival mechanisms which work for the most part, albeit not very efficiently.  However, when the cost of maintaining these survival skills becomes greater than facing the cost of facing the fears which created them, people are ready to change.  I see myself as helping people face their demons and start a new way of living their lives. 

More than half of my cases are with couples and another forty percent are with individuals.   The balance is with families.  I love my work.  I know I am successful about 85% of the time which I think is rather high among my colleagues.  While I do many other things than just doing therapy, therapy is my first love and always will be.  I am at my best as a therapist.  Now at age 60 and having 37 years of experience behind me, I consider myself in my prime.  

I see myself working at several different levels with my clients.  At times, providing a supportive environment and relationship for clients is, in itself, a therapeutic experience.  I often marvel how simply having a client tell their story out loud to an nonjudgmental but sincerely interested other promotes significant change.  In a similar vein, when working with couples I see how important it is for two people to “make a date” with a therapist to look at their relationship.  For many people taking the time to meet with the intimate partner one hour per week works wonders.  I am not beyond valuing these simple therapeutic “interventions.” 

At a little deeper level people seem to be struggling to survive in a very demanding time.  Living at the turn of the twentieth century in North America places certain demands upon people which have never before been experienced.  This is especially true for modern couples.  Two career families (which are really three career families if you consider that two working people must also run a household) face immeasurable stress.  Unfortunately we think our homes should run the way they did when there was a full time homemaker.  This is unreasonable.  Reassessing what a “well functioning”  dual career family looks like is very important “therapy.”  Although life is naturally stressful, the stress we can actually change has to do with the expectations we bring to our selves,  our relationships, and our families.           

Finally, the deepest levels at which I work has to do with the ways we struggle to maintain our self worth.  The families which have raised us have, in effect, woven a giant hypnosis around us.  Our parents and siblings initially tell us everything about the world and our selves.  Some families tell us that the world is a very hostile place and we must be on guard, offensive, defensive, in control, or give up trying.    Under this type of hypnosis, how one survives dictates how “good” a person one is.  Others' family hypnoses say the world is safe and can effectively be exploited for personal gain.  In this type of family the measure of the self has to do with what one can achieve. 

These are just two of many different survival styles adopted by children reared in particular families.  There are many others.  However, most maturing people want more out of life that to “survive.”  They want to live more fully.  To do so we must learn to take the risk abandoning  the survival style in favor of finding a more gratifying way to live.  What ever the messages about the world and the self are, people must address the old hypnosis and come to terms about the self and the world from a current adult perspective based upon one’s own judgment; not one ruled by an emotional history.  This work takes some time, but it is well worth the investment to bring about a more satisfying life with more gratifying human relationships.