About Therapy
If you’ve never visited a therapist before, you may be eager or anxious to know what the experience might be like. It is a strange notion that you will talk about your current life situation with someone you’re just getting to know. I think you’ll find that my engaged, collaborative style will help you to feel more relaxed in relating what it is that’s upsetting you and less alone with these feelings. Most people I see have an initial feeling of relief that they’ve found someone who will listen to them intently, understand their current problems and begin to show them a path toward feeling better.
Over the following weeks, you will see that the more you get to know me and trust me, we will begin to share more details about your current problems, but also important and impactful experiences from your past as well. In this way, helping to find a path to your better life involves understanding how these past experiences have both hindered and enhanced your sense of yourself.
While I currently work with mostly adults, much of my early experience was gained from working with adolescents and their families. What I learned in a powerfully direct and sometimes painful way was how an adolescent’s emerging sense of their identity and pride in who they were becoming, while sometimes supported and nurtured by their caregivers, was more often overlooked, neglected, or worse, repudiated. It was gratifying to be able to intervene with these families in a way that helped the caregivers understand how their own histories affected their ability to take care of their kid’s attempts at defining themselves.
You may not have benefited from an early intervention like this, but this is why I believe in the value of what I do. At any point in your life, therapy can serve that vital function of shedding light on how an enhanced and more expansive self has been obscured by these impinging experiences. Let’s discover who you are striving to be together.
About Will
Over the years, I’ve realized there are two important factors that helped in shaping who I am and my sense of myself and inform how I think about working with you. One was the importance of having the support of friends, family and mentor figures at crucial and challenging times in my life. The other has been the importance of taking risks and pursuing challenges in my career and in my life outside of work. Whether it was rock climbing, bicycle racing or playing drums in bands in New York when I was younger, and, ahem, slightly fitter, or now skiing and hiking, these pursuits gave me a vital sense of feeling alive. Having had those experiences, I’ve come to believe that each of us has a uniquely striving self that is sometimes thwarted or can be nurtured.
I earned my MSW from New York University in 2000 and have been in agency and private practice ever since. I have been a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in New York State since 2005. Much of my early clinical experience came from working with adolescents and their families in a preventive services program in Brooklyn where I served for a time as Director. I also provided clinical supervision to MSW students and to early-career clinicians. I’ve always been an intellectually curious person and believe in continuing my education and training. I’m currently completing a four-year program in psychoanalysis at the Institute for the Psychological Study of Subjectivity. I am active in presenting clinical cases and frequently participate in conferences related to relational psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.