Experiential individual, couples and group therapy toward inner freedom and fuller contact with your life
In-person in Atwater Village, Los Angeles
Therapy for therapists
The person underneath the role
When the chair turns around, you may notice how fast you start doing the job on yourself. A feeling becomes projection. A hard relationship becomes an attachment formulation. Your need gets abandoned in service of another's.
That knowledge is valuable, and it can also keep you one step ahead of something uncomfortable. You might say, "I'm noticing I want your approval," with such composure that neither of us has met what wanting it feels like. Does it embarrass you? Does it matter whether I like you? What if you became a client who disappointed me?
Many of us come to this work as wounded healers. Some of us learned young to read a parent's mood before a word was said, and to give people what they needed before they had to ask. That attunement can make you very good at this job. It can also mean your own longing to be seen and attended to has waited a long time, met mostly secondhand, through being needed, trusted, and appreciated by the people you help in your practice or elsewhere. That's part of why the work means so much to you, and part of why it can leave you so depleted.
You might love your work and feel furious at what it asks of you. You may have complicated feelings about supervisors, colleagues, clients, the profession, or your own wish to be admired as good at what you do.
We can talk about all that you feel: wanting attention, loneliness, jealousy, desire, shame, humor, or not knowing what you want. Your own needs, the ones you spend all day attending to in others, can come first.
I'm another person in the room, and I may experience you differently from the way you've made sense of yourself. You're free to disagree with me. We can stay with what's happening between us without translating it straight into clinical language.
What a group teaches that training can't
Being a member of a group can change both your relationships and your work. You find out how you actually come across: who you reach toward, who you keep at a distance, how fast you start looking after everyone else. You might believe another member finds you disappointing, ask, and discover they're having a completely different experience. The patterns that show up here are the ones you live with partners, friends and colleagues, and in group you get to respond differently while it's happening.
It changes how you sit with clients too. You know from the inside what it costs to say something true in front of others, how much one person's response can matter, and what it's like to be helped instead of helping. Therapists often find they become more present and less guarded in their own sessions, and more trusting of what happens between people when nobody rushes to fix it.
The more of yourself you can bear to feel, the more of your relationships, including clients, you can bear to understand.