“TThe causes are in the past but the solution is in the present moment.”
-Jack Kilpatrick
If you’re reading this you might be exhausted from anxiety that keeps your mind racing at 3 am, or from the fog of depression that makes even the smallest tasks feel like wading through mud. Maybe you’ve tried to “think positive” [doesn’t work], argue with negative self-talk [doesn’t work- your self keeps talking back], or just grit your teeth and push through it [achieve basic stuff at great emotional cost while feeling miserable]. You’re probably fully aware of the difficult developmental experiences that caused your current pain [doesn’t help much-the solution is distinct from the causes]. These approaches are, at best, associated with older forms of cognitive behavioral therapy. At worst, they’re associated with ‘70’s self-help ideas.
I help anyone looking for a commonsense approach to reclaim their lives from the thoughts and feelings that have stopped them from moving forward. I specialize in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) for anxiety and depression. Unlike traditional therapies that might spend years dissecting your past, ACT is a skills-based approach. We can’t control the universe or other people, but we can control our approach and the skills we employ. With ACT, we focus on “Psychological Flexibility,” which is the ability to act effectively on goals that matter to us while being minimally distracted by difficult thoughts and emotions.
ACCEPTANCE: We stop wasting energy trying to win a wrestling match with our anxiety or sadness. We learn to let the anxiety sit in the passenger seat while we do the driving. Instead of arguing with difficult thoughts, it’s about letting those thoughts run in the background without being too concerned about their content-letting them be just thoughts.
There’s no Star Trek-style mind erasure. Everything that happened in our past will still be a memory. The trick is to let it be just a memory and not something that keeps pulling us back to a past we’ve worked hard to overcome.
COMMITMENT: We identify what actually matters to you (vs what is supposed to matter to you)- your work, your relationships, your passions- and we take concrete steps toward them. We strip away the “should” and find out what actually motivates you.
HOW WE WORK TOGETHER: I provide a direct, grounded environment where we develop a common language for what it’s like to be you, what’s holding you back, and what motivates you. I don’t do any “how does that make you feel?” I don’t go on open ended, pseudo-Freudian fishing expeditions into the past without offering you some way to cope with your difficult thoughts, emotions, and memories.
Instead, we focus on:
Getting Unstuck: Breaking the loops of overthinking
Action Over Analysis: Identifying the values that give your life meaning and acting on them
Opening Up: Developing the capacity to cope with difficult emotions
Being Here Now: Developing the capacity to live in the present
“I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.” Joseph Campbell
I keep coming back to this Joseph Campbell quote because it captures the spirit of ACT. All of life is “this moment,” and “this moment,” and then “this moment” until it’s over. A stop sign means “stop.” This moment doesn’t signify anything because it is the thing in itself. This is now.
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