General Psychotherapy for Adults

Life presents problems that are hard to solve alone.

As adults, we face many challenges that are hard to resolve.

These problems can include personal conflicts with a partner or family members, pressure from work, and the inability to cope with various issues that life presents.

Such challenges can lead to stress, dissatisfaction, and physical problems like insomnia.

Psychotherapy provides a means of addressing problems that adults face, helping them overcome and cope with those problems. Let’s look at Gina* and how psychotherapy helped her.

Gina* left something behind while rushing forward.

One day Gina called me. She was a 38-year-old attorney who had worked hard to become a partner at a law firm. Accomplishing this required her to put her personal life on hold for years to establish financial and career stability for herself and the family she envisioned.

Unfortunately, there was no family. Gina said the pandemic had disrupted the timeline she had created. Now, she felt alone and cheated by life, and work no longer provided that much satisfaction because many people no longer came into the office.

Thoughts of the future made Gina feel sad and anxious. She had trouble sleeping well at night and was taking antidepressants, but they made little difference.

Gina sought therapy with me.

Gina’s treatment was intense.

Initially, Gina did two sessions a week with me. She was in a rush, and imagery at the beginning of the session helped her focus a bit on her inner world. As a therapist, I felt an enormous pressure to ‘fix things,’ but we worked with this pressure.

We discovered, working together, that Gina’s whole life involved rushing. She was born early, went to school early, graduated early, and racked up a collection of trophies as her parents rushed her from a hockey competition to a piano recital. The expectations on her had been suffocating – leaving no room for herself.

In the treatment, we made room for Gina. We explored her hopes and expectations, her fear of having more burdens placed upon her in an intimate relationship, and her use of work as a ‘relationship buffer.’

We are now nearly 18 months into Gina’s treatment, and the same courage that took her to therapy got her into the dating world. She is no longer using antidepressants but wants to continue treatment to help her navigate relationships in which her terms matter, too. We call it ‘The Good Fight.’

Discover what’s meaningful in your life.

As a therapist, I believe that an examined life is worth living. Therapy is putting one’s life under the microscope to discover what works and what doesn’t work. After that, one replaces every behavior and pattern that doesn’t work with those that do.

Psychotherapy can be challenging and, at the same time, fun – often both at the same time. You get as much out of individual therapy as you put into it.

If you want to discover your own ‘good fight,’ give me a call!

*Name and story are composite narratives that do not reflect an actual client.