I pay attention to the patterns that organize your life.
Not the problems that brought you in, but the way you are built to respond to them. That is where the work happens.
I work from a psychodynamic and characterological framework. In practice, that means we pay attention to the patterns that organize your life, not just the problems that brought you in. The specific issue you came to talk about matters, but it usually turns out to be one expression of something more fundamental: a way of relating to yourself, to other people, and to your own feelings that has been running for a long time, largely outside awareness.
What I Mean by Patterns
Everyone has a characteristic way of being in the world. A way of managing anxiety. A way of handling closeness. A way of dealing with conflict, or avoiding it. A way of relating to their own needs, their own anger, their own vulnerability. These patterns aren't random. They were built in response to the specific relational environment you grew up in, and they made sense at the time. The problem is that they keep running long after the original environment has changed, producing the same outcomes in new relationships, new jobs, new countries.
The person who can't stop people-pleasing isn't weak. They built a self-regulatory system organized around managing other people's reactions, because at some point that was the safest strategy available. The person who shuts down during conflict isn't choosing to stonewall. They learned that emotional engagement was dangerous, and the shutdown is the system doing what it was designed to do. The person who keeps ending up in the same kind of relationship isn't making bad choices. They're working from an internal map that was drawn in childhood and hasn't been updated.
How Attention Works in This Framework
The psychologist David Shapiro, whose work has deeply influenced my approach, understood personality as a mode of attention. Not what you think, but what you notice. Not what you feel, but what you allow yourself to feel. Character style, in Shapiro's framework, is the habitual, largely automatic way a person's attention is organized: what gets registered, what gets filtered out, and what gets distorted in the process.
This is what I pay attention to in therapy. Not just the content of what you're telling me, but the way your attention organizes the telling. What you move toward and what you move away from. What you elaborate and what you skip. What you feel and what you report feeling, which are often not the same thing. The patterns show up in the room, in real time, in the way you relate to me and to the material we're working with. That's where the most useful work happens.
What Sessions Feel Like
Sessions are conversational. There's no intake form, no worksheet, no homework. I don't assign exercises between sessions or ask you to journal. The work happens in the room, through the quality of attention we bring to what's actually going on, which is usually more interesting than what you planned to talk about.
I'm direct. If I see something, I'll say it. Not as interpretation delivered from on high, but as observation offered for your consideration. You'll always know what I'm thinking, because I think clarity is more useful than technique. I'm also genuinely interested. Not in a performative, therapeutic-warmth way. In the way you're interested in a person whose mind works differently from yours and who is showing you how they see the world.
The goal isn't for me to understand your situation. It's for you to understand yourself so well that you no longer need me to.
What This Works Well For
This approach is particularly effective for people who have already tried other things. You may have done CBT and found it helpful for managing symptoms but felt it didn't touch the deeper thing. You may have done talk therapy and felt listened to but not changed. You may have read every self-help book and understand your patterns intellectually but can't stop repeating them. If you sense that what's keeping you stuck isn't a lack of willpower or the right technique but something you can't quite see about yourself, this is designed for that.
I work with individuals and couples online, in English, worldwide. Schedule a 15-minute call to see if this feels like the right fit for you.