Dear Client-

My heart aches for the pain that you have survived, and I have the upmost respect for the way that you have learned to survive in spite of your wounds. The first thing that I want you to know is I seek to provide you with a safe place for us to work together, where I can teach you the skills you need not only to heal your wounds, but how to develop the skills to reach your own goals in a healthy way.

Unfortunately in this culture, and in most of the world, there are few places where healthy skills or how to get ones needs met in a healthy way are taught. I see my role as a teacher. One who has studied and learned about many different kinds of tools that will work and I seek to teach you the skills to get your needs met in healthy ways. In this process you will learn the skills necessary to develop healthy relationships. My goal is to teach each one of you as many skills as possible so that you will have the most choices available to you. The chances that you will then be able to make a healthy choice are then greatly magnified.

But before you have the tools you need it is almost like the day before you learned to read. You can’t ask someone to do something they have no idea how to. Maybe you have no idea why you keep falling into the same patterns with the same unhappy outcomes. Let me try to explain. Even if we know in our head that the right thing to do is, we need to be able to have the emotional tools, as well at the intellectual tools in order to put these into practice. The day before you learned how to read, you simply did not know how to read. Nobody judged you for not knowing how.

A much clearer and simpler explanation would be we really all do the best we are capable of doing at any given time. If we knew how to do it better we would. My job is to give you enough new skills so that you can do it better, have more choices, and make healthier decisions.

In my practice there is no blame or judgment. If you come in for couples counseling, you need to accept that up until you came in, you have each done the best you knew how to in that relationship. My job is to teach you how to do it better.

For those of you in relationships you need to know that passion ebbs and flows depending on whether enough energy is being put into a relationship, and whether or not the wounds are being actively healed both with my help and your partners. Once that process is underway, there are specific techniques to help revive the passion that initially brought you together.