How It Works
In therapy we try to understand how you came to be the person you are today, what parts of yourself you like and want to keep, what parts no longer fit your image of who you want to be, what you might like to cultivate instead, and how to get there.
Feeling Safe
Helping you feel better and achieve what you want requires an environment where it feels safe enough to talk about what’s really troubling you. It’s important for the therapist to listen and understand in a non-judgmental, empathic, yet perceptive and insightful way. It’s common to be stuck in patterns that no longer serve you well, and not know how to change them. It’s normal to be anxious and depressed in a difficult world where the future is uncertain. It’s also normal to have conflicting feelings about people, love, work, play, life.
Flexible & Interactive Approach
My approach is flexible and interactive. I work psychodynamically, which means understanding the interaction of the conscious and unconscious mental or emotional processes that affect and influence our behavior and our choices. In short, it could be called “insight-oriented” therapy.
Sometimes we operate in ways that make us get in our own way, and we’re not even aware of it. It’s like those orange cones on the highway blocking a lane and slowing down traffic. We often unwittingly put obstacles in our path that prevent us from getting what we say we want. And it’s frustrating. This process helps you both understand and rework those self-defeating patterns so you can feel less conflicted, make different choices, and be more content with your life.
About Diagnosis
I generally don’t like to use labels to diagnose you. It tends to be counterproductive and gets in the way of a clear and meaningful understanding of you or whatever you think I want you to be talking about. It’s far more useful and effective to look at your present and past behaviors, and to explore what’s going on for you emotionally in order to help you find a way to accept yourself and let go of the self-defeating patterns getting in your way, than to be concerned with finding a name for it.
However, in looking at the issues written about here, you might recognize yourself in one or more of them, and start to get an idea of the dynamics of what’s distressing you, and what we would begin to talk about in therapy. This begins the process of mitigating the distress, and unraveling the conflicts that underlie the maladaptive ways of coping that you have adopted to deal with them. If there is an issue that is troubling you that is not addressed in one of these topics, check back periodically to see if a new page has been added, and feel free to write me with suggestions for issues not yet covered.
To learn more
Call: 212 228-2424 · Email: katherine.rabinowitz@gmail.com