Individual Therapy
Individual Therapy in Newport Beach
Why is Therapy Important?
You did it. You made it here – to this page. This is a big deal. So many people toggle back and forth with the idea of finding a psychologist and reaching out for help. They search, delete the search tab, search again, call but hang up – over and over, sometimes for years. It’s an act of vulnerability to ask for professional help and society’s stigma doesn’t make it any easier.
Contrary to the old American mythology of “pride in strength”, you are not weak in asking for help – its actually an act of courage. I mean, what is “strength” really? The ability to push up against something you feel is an obstacle. It’s so much easier to stay stuck and to hide what hurts. You don’t need to change anything then, but ignoring the problem or pattern does not make it go away. Thats the easy way. Reaching out IS an act of strength and courage. It requires pushing past your own personal vow of silence, moving past pride or denial, through fears of shame, and into the care of someone who can help. Congratulations, you are there. I really mean this. Welcome to your new and improved version of strength.
We have found that what brings people into therapy are not typically encapsulated problems – although they are often described in these terms (e.g. I have anxiety, I am lonely, depressed, angry). They are woven into the fabric of their lives. They are embedded in, and inseparable from, the persons characteristic ways of thinking, feeling, behaving, coping, defending, and relating to others – ones personality. Understanding and unpacking these patterns in terms of where they came from and how they operate now are critical to creating long-lasting change. Only through this process can you gain control over these patterns and become less vulnerable to the certain kinds of suffering they produce.
Our patterns create our emotions and our emotions form the core of who we are—understanding them improves the quality of our lives. While we incorporate a variety of modalities into our work, we tend to focus on the here-and-now. This means that we pay a lot of attention to what’s happening not just in your life between sessions, but also what’s happening in the room, between you and the therapist, during our sessions. Your past will come up so that we can uncover motives, feelings, and patterns outside of your awareness, but we don’t believe that spending years talking about your folks is the most effective way to help you. Eventually, after facing what was, we can face what is.
As primarily psychodynamic clinicians we understand personality as the ways in which we learned to regulate our emotional lives. In fact, this is the underpinnings of describing someones “personality.” Our emotional life is constructed at an early age and the ways in which we interact with our own feelings and experiences lies in these early templates. We learn in our families which emotions are allowed, attended to, validated, and feared. Our job as children is to keep connected to caregivers and we learn how to manage our emotions to best suite a stable connection. Through these experiences we develop an implicit template, parts of us grow, other parts are cut off. Understanding your own story and learning, in the context of a therapeutic relationship, how to experience emotions fully, regulate them, and stay connected to another person at the same time is a critical healing element of psychotherapy.
We take a creative and practical approach that allows you to understand more experientially what drives and restricts you, and to identify more useful ways of being – in the here and now. The idea isn’t to get bogged down in analysis, but to quiet the “noise” that distracts you, so that you can focus your energy on what’s meaningful, productive, and fulfilling.
When to Consider Therapy
The secret agreed upon by most experienced clinicians is that targeting symptoms is unproductive. However, unearthing the personality patterns that underlie the productions of those symptoms is where the therapeutic magic happens. This is not just clinical wisdom; it’s a scientific fact. A very specific cluster of personality factors are often the driving factor for psychiatric symptoms. For example, the personality issues most often reported by experienced clinicians as clinically significant include the following concerns:
- problems with intimacy, relatedness, or commitment in close relationships
- difficulties with assertiveness or expression of anger
- problems with separation, abandonment, or rejection
- problems with self-esteem
- problems with authority
- shyness or difficulty getting close to people or making friends
- perfectionism or high self-criticism
What to Expect
First and foremost, you can expect to be heard and understood on a deep level. The beginning of therapy always consists of developing meaningful, accurate and insightful understandings of the current issues you are facing. Issues are often more complicated and complex than we know. This may take some time to identify as we are profoundly wedded to and soothed by the power of the familiar. Even if it’s good, what is new can be difficult.
We establish patterns of addressing issues in our lives during challenging times (often early in life in par with our unique inborn traits) but we don’t drop those skills/habits when the issues are over. In fact, we often find familiar people, places, and things to re-enact our hard won skillsets for better or worse. The world feels safe and familiar that way and familiar misery is always preferred to the misery of unfamiliar insecurity as you venture a new path. In therapy, it also takes a little time to warm-up, feel safe, and begin the process of taking a certain pain (e.g. anxiety, depression, anger) and begin peeling back the layers of the onion around it. Be patient in the beginning. People who have completed a meaningful therapy often say something to the tune of “I wouldn’t be where I am or who I am today without that time in therapy.” This can be your story too.
Finding a Good Therapist
In terms of what makes therapy effective – research shows that the most significant factor in a successful outcome is the relationship with the therapist—that feeling of “they get me.” It’s important to find the kind of therapist that has the ability to connect in this way, someone who feels “real”. This element is more important than any learning that could occur. It matters even more than the therapist’s training, the kind of therapy they do, or what kind of problem the person has. Connection leads to safety which leads to the process of therapy unfolding, its effortless when this is at the base of things.
As active, involved therapists, our goals are to help you look at your life more clearly and join you in the discovery of all the complexities that make up you. We want you to leave our practice with an ongoing sense of honesty with yourself. By claiming and understanding your own history, you can be freed of the traumatic auto-pilots of the past and avoid recreating old painful scenarios.
In the process of therapy your basic personality will not change but come into fullness – small, yet extremely meaningful modifications can create an entirely different life without having to create an entirely different person. Getting better, regardless of diagnosis, centers on finding your inner voice, gut reactions, and then learning to follow them in a constructive way. However, psychotherapy isn’t always about changing yourself, sometimes it’s about accepting what cannot be changed. The power of this cannot be overstated – understanding, acceptance, and grief are vital in healing for some.
In the course of therapy, you can expect to learn some new tools and skills to do so. This often includes developing language to better describe your inner world, finding healthier boundaries in relationships, learning to trust your intuition and communicating more effectively with the important people in your life. We find that most pathology ends up being expressed through denying ones own perceptions, needs, and feelings. In other words, people come out better equipped to say what they feel, and feel what they say. They leave with depth and insight. They report that they know themselves more fully, and utilize their insights and self-discovery to better navigate life’s challenges.
A key feature in successful therapy is that over time one is able to develop a “third eye” (also called an “observing ego” or “reflective function) for their lives and more readily pick up on their own habits, patterns, and ways of being in the world – be it with themselves or how they show up in relationships. Ultimately, they are able to embrace the risk of being all that they are and find enjoyment in love, work, and play.
Our Approaches to Therapy
- Psychodynamic
- Humanistic
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapist (CBT)
- Interpersonal Psychotherapy (IPT)
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
Read more anxiety therapy on our blog at Anxiety Disorders: What you need to know
