My Approach:

I welcome all adult patients (+18), of all social, cultural and religious backgrounds. Among the common issues that I help with are depression, social and general anxiety, eating disorders, addictions of various kinds, difficulties in forming social and romantic relationships, work related stress, existential dread, the challenges of parenthood and coping with crisis, life transitions and loss.

Naming common problems and grouping people into categories can be useful, but only to a certain extent. Although human beings resemble one another in that they struggle with similar worries and concerns, once they enter therapy they present as unique individuals, and I do not believe in generic solutions for unique individual problems.

People often come to therapy with a specific problem that they wish to “work on”, just to find out, with time, that some other issue, deeply buried but still unresolved, is actually the real thing that has been troubling them, that’s been somehow “triggered”. It could take some time to realize that such is the case - but it would be a main focus of the beginning phase of any treatment - recognizing that, together.

As a social worker, I was taught to observe the person as a whole by taking into consideration social, economic and cultural factors - forces into which we are born that are outside any individual’s control. I therefore find it appropriate at times to take a pragmatic, solution-focused approach and to engage on a more practical level for the purpose of improving one’s life in a concrete way. Sometimes, CBT techniques and DBT skills might be the best course of action.

However, my work is mostly influenced by traditional and contemporary psychoanalytic theories- Freudian, Lacanian, object relations, relational, self-psychology - all of which strive in their own way to make the unconscious conscious. However, imposing a general theory on a person in dogmatic fashion is never helpful. Therefore, one guiding principle that I aim to uphold is to avoid doing that.

Furthermore, I am not here to tell you what to do or what to think. My purpose is to listen to you, and, since I do not know you better than you know yourself - I am also here to help you to listen to yourself so that you can expand your access into that endless ocean of self-knowledge that you already posses. By listening to yourself more carefully you could make everything that you know about yourself much more intelligible and useful for yourself. In addition to that, the more that you allow me to know you the better I would be able to make some comments that would be helpful.