“We live somewhere between the lives we have and the lives we’d like.”
 

Adam Phillips — Missing Out

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Welcome

Welcome to my website.

I am an individual and couple psychotherapist and psychoanalyst with an office in Fairview, located in downtown Vancouver. I use a psychodynamic/psychoanalytic approach primarily. You will find information on the therapy services I offer — individual psychoanalytic psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, couple therapy — as well as on my background, fees and insurance, and how to contact me.

When people turn to a therapist, they have done their best to get past difficulties on their own. Something more is needed to regain balance. Psychoanalytically oriented therapy is based on the belief that when we are children, our ability to feel starts before our ability to think. We continue to think through our feelings, even as adults, but those feelings may become disconnected from how we act, what we consciously think, or how we wish we could be. This disconnection leads us to feel that we are trapped by our past or living with “if only” yearnings.

How do we live out these disconnections? In repeated patterns of friction with people at work and in our love lives; in feelings of loneliness and shyness, anxiety and depression, moodiness and confusion; in recurrent experiences of falling or fragmenting; in longstanding feelings of being a fraud. Since the meaning of these experiences  is out of awareness, even strong personal will power, the advice of friends, family, and self-help books may fail to bring relief and the ability to make satisfying changes. Feeling stuck and miserable can cloud many areas of life.

This may be your first time considering talking with a therapist, or perhaps you are coming back to psychotherapy to work on something new. Some of the approaches and points of view I’ve used and developed over 19 years of practice along with my own lived experience have given me an understanding of the ways in which our habits of the heart and of the mind may become automatic. Without another mind to discover and reflect with, these remain invisible obstacles. It takes tremendous energy to become aware of how they keep us tied up and in pain, unsatisfied in our intimate relationships, at work and in our studies, frozen when time is passing.