Change the Narrative Counseling
Untying the Strings that Bind our Inner Child
Being in the circus taught me that juggling too many balls in the air can lead to feeling like you're always picking up the pieces rather than enjoying the show.
While our emotions float up and down, we start applying binary labels of "good" (happy) and "bad" (anger, sadness, anxiety) that our systems (e.g., US Society, Family, Culture) have assigned.
Improve self-awareness of our emotions, thoughts, and the stories we tell ourselves about our worth internally, with others, and in the world. Change the Narrative you've internalized through identifying, observing, respecting, and accepting emotions.
I specialize in Group Therapy as a primary treatment and run several Interpersonal Process groups. Working on yourself as well as understanding how other's impact you is key in applying therapy. Group provides a space to work through tolerating emotional experiences and confronting patterns of resistance towards expressing anger and accepting intimacy.
“When we compare, we see ourselves as superior, inferior, or as trying to be equal. But with this kind of comparing comes discrimination, and with discrimination comes suffering.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Reconciliation: Healing the Inner Child
Free Consultation
**Free 30-min Video Consultation**
To me, it's important to meaningfully connect with your therapist as you are trusting them by opening the door to your life's most difficult or sensitive moments. By establishing trust, we can create an openness to our emotional experience. I offer free in person consultations for the first session to begin building a strong foundation for growth.
Services I Offer
Times in EST:
Monday - 7:00 - 9:00 PM
Sunday - 1:30 - 3:30 PM
Sunday - 4:00 - 6:00 PM
Sunday - 7:00 - 9:00 PM
Do you have a desire to learn group therapy to better integrate it into your practice but feel intimidated by the concept of being "in the process?"
One of the primary ways to learn is to engage first hand. This group trains mental health professionals and gives them an experience being part of an ongoing process group while the leader reflects on multiple theoretical modalities at the end of session. This allows reflection on the theory, techniques, and roles that members took on during the group session.
Group Therapy
Our life is spent in groups. Everything that makes up our “self”: our thoughts, our feelings, & our values, comes from others. We are our others in that way. So why would we explore the complexity of ourselves with only one other person to help us see the many parts that make us who we are?
One-on-one therapy can be helpful to explore your story in-depth and provides insight into who you are, but insight alone is not enough to change your narrative. You need to be able to practice and challenge your narrative about who you are, how people see you, and how you fit in the world. Sometimes, individual therapy can devolve into a waiting game, seeing if in between sessions you can find the right opportunity to practice new skills such as being more assertive, holding and expressing anger effectively, setting boundaries, or leaning into expressing and accepting emotional intimacy with others.
Group therapy provides you a consistent 90-minutes each week for you to work through your past problems in the present room. How? Well, the theory of group is that the way you think, feel, and interact with certain relationships outside of the room will be recreated and lived within the present group. How we do this is we simply ask that group members agree to stay present and put their immediate thoughts, feelings, urges, fantasies, and relationship associations into the room. I ask members to be curious about the meaning behind the words and actions they do. We aim to be specific with our emotional experiences, highlighting there are no "good" or "bad" feelings.
If this sounds intimidating, then I have good news, there is no right way to do group. The goal of the group, paradoxically, is not to change you. It is to identify and honor the ways you have had to adapt to your socio-cultural systems throughout life. Like strings on a marionette, we are pulled by expectations and messages given to us by family, society, friends, and others which go unnoticed. However you show up, our goal is to create a culture of curiosity as to the purpose of that behavior.
For example, silence isn’t silent. It was probably protective for you to do earlier in life, and it could speak to a message now of “I’m afraid of being judged” or “If I speak too much, then I might get hurt.” Describing yourself as a “dumpster fire,” when you introduce yourself to members, may make some people find you humorous and funny, but it may also make others feel you are insincere or that they might worry that you’ll make light of their problems if they share them with you, closing a door for connection that you may not have wanted to be closed.
We bring to light the adaptations you use in the group, noticing if and how they parallel your earlier life experiences and become curious about how you can lean into the discomfort of avoided emotional experiences to build up your resilience.
Think of group therapy as a laboratory in which you can test out new ways of being within a contained environment built to bring awareness to your blind spots, that will afford you multiple, diverse perspectives, where people can give you respectful, yet honest feedback, and will assist you in increasing your emotional resilience when you’re feeling criticized.
To Summarize, each person in group can be used as a mirror, each moment, a point of reference to another relationship or dynamic in your life which can help you work to better understand yourself, others, and how you impact and co-create the world around you. You simply have to state whatever comes to your mind in the present moment, be curious about others in the room, and challenge yourself to change the narrative.
Private Individual Therapy
Imagine a wilted rose on the side of the road. We do not turn on the rose, stating “What a lazy rose. It’s clearly depressed. It needs to get over its resistance. Stop self-sabotaging yourself rose! Try harder. Plenty of flowers over there are growing just fine. Clearly, the problem is you.” No, we look at the rose with compassion. Much like a rose never chooses to wilt, if you or I ever have a critical thought or feeling towards the self, we know it cannot be from us. We can be mindful, curious, and inquire, “If you’re hearing that critical voice, who or what system is telling you that narrative?”
My stance in therapy is a Buddhist-informed lens that seeks to illuminate our human-nature, shifting from a view of blaming and shaming the self to a systems-centered view of compassion. If we naturally want to flourish and connect to the world, what is pulling us down? Is it the roots of our past? Is it the drought of nourishment in our present? How can we notice what needs you have at this moment, here and now? Never settle for the binary language of “I just don’t want to feel bad.”
Let us look deeply into what it means to say, “I feel good or bad?” Is “good or bad” really a feeling? Why do we consider any feelings bad? What makes irritation, loneliness, hopelessness, guilt, and fear our enemies (Krishnamurti, 1964)? Psychology adheres more to an individualistic, medical model rather than the systems-centered social philosophy of its roots, and this extends to our theories and practice (Distiller, 2022; Dalal, 2002, 2016). Medical models focus on treating, reducing, and healing a person’s symptoms when they have an illness within their body. The parallel is easy to see when discussing “mental illness.” We naturally draw on the idea of our emotions as the symptoms and psychotherapy as the vaccination for our disease.
The problem is, our emotions are an outside-in response to phenomena, not an inside-out failure of the self. If emotions are the weather caused by the systems around us, then what does it do to us to use the term mental illness? If we look deeply when we describe depression or anxiety, we will see these symptoms are simply subjective, emotional experiences, and physiological sensations (Distiller, 2022; Hardy, 2018).
My goal in therapy is to assist clients in utilizing Buddhist-informed mindfulness practices to change the narrative on their binary view towards their emotions shifting from the fantasy of happily ever after to the reality of meaningful ever after.
Put in a simpler, less psycho-babble way, our emotions can feel like someone's handing us a pile of manure. They can feel real shitty to hold. My goal is to help cultivate an environment where we can transform those emotions into fertilizer for growth, understanding, and compassion.
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