San Francisco Bay Area Marriage and Family Therapist Intern
Registration #IMF 42021
Supervised by Kim Ives Bailey, MFT
License #MFC 32076

How do I work?

LISTENING

One of the most important things I focus on is what I’m being told; I make a point to listen and to understand as clearly as I can. If you decide to work with me, I want to pay attention to everything you tell me in session — about your relationships, about what is and isn’t working for you, about your joys, about what you’re unhappy with, and where you want things to be different. I make a commitment to hear what I’m being told without allowing judgment to enter into my experience. Remaining free of judgment allows me to work with you and to want nothing for you other than happiness and health. Rather than trying to take on the role of telling you what to do — of introducing an agenda that belongs to me — I believe I can be more helpful and responsible if I pay careful attention to what you are saying so I can better understand what you want and need.

ADVICE

Giving advice, and imagining that I am wise enough to have the answers for any dilemma, is something that in my experience just doesn’t work. If I made my practice about giving advice, I would tend to advise you to do things as I would (or as I think I would). The problem is that what might work perfectly well for me might not work at all for you. There is no way I could possibly imagine everything that you know about the situation you’re dealing with. By giving advice based on what I think I know and what I think should happen, I would, in effect, resolve my own anxiety over whatever you have brought for discussion, but would rob you of the opportunity to discover what ideas and resources you could use. It’s my job to help you discover what will work for you, based on who you are and how you can apply the skills and experience you already have.

YOUR EXPERIENCE

If you decide to work with me, one area we would likely work towards would be identifying and clarifying the circumstances, thoughts, and feelings you are experiencing. When we work towards increased understanding, we begin to see things that have been in our lives for some time, but have been unrecognized. What we begin to see might be something that looks like a pattern. You may recognize that you’re being taken advantage of time after time; or perhaps you’re using an unrecognized tone of voice (such as expressing anger about something you’re not aware of being angry about). You may discover an unrecognized attitude about something (such as not believing in yourself). There may be any number of things that contribute to life not working out the way we’d like. Once things are recognized and acknowledged, choices become available to us that we’ve never had before. Making informed choices puts us in a place where we are far more likely to reach our goals and achieve our desires.

INSIGHT

There are many ways to describe how helpful and fulfilling it can be to expand self-awareness and insight. One way to describe successful therapy is to think of a jigsaw puzzle for which you have never seen the final picture. Imagine that puzzle poured out of its box onto a table. It looks like a mass of random colors and shapes — no patterns and no meaning. But, as you spend time with it you begin to notice pieces that do fit together. As you work on putting one or two pieces together here and there, you begin to find that there is a pattern after all. The more you fit the pieces together, the clearer the picture becomes and before long all the pieces have been placed — the puzzle is solved and the picture is clear. Arriving at a clear understanding of a problem that used to be confusing and impossible can be an incredibly freeing and exhilarating experience.

Please contact me here for more information >>>