People I Work With

Prospective clients with the following concerns seek me out.

Depression and anxiety related to lack of meaning and purpose in the second half of life

With or without an apparent cause, many people begin to feel dissatisfied, empty and unreal in their everyday lives. Having achieved outward success, they feel as if something essential is missing. Life feels meaningless and purposeless. They feel their identity is breaking down and old values no longer hold true.

Often they try to deny these feelings through addictive behavior, by having affairs, changing jobs, or moving to a new locale, but this only drives the feelings underground. The depression comes back later with greater intensity.

My experience is that this state of depression is a call to realize one’s essential Self, which is veiled by the false self with which one is normally identified. These people tell me they are longing for something more real, more fundamental than the self they’ve known and the life they’ve lived thus far. They want therapy to address long-standing issues concerning self-esteem, love, power, and dependency. But they also want it to go far deeper by helping them to connect to the spiritual dimension of the psyche, including their essential Self, the source of meaning and purpose.

Problems concerning love, relationships, and sexuality

Many people come to therapy because they don’t know how to love, have difficulty falling and remaining in love, have difficulty integrating love and sexuality, and struggle with feelings of anger, shyness, humiliation, embarrassment, and low self-esteem, which block them from having satisfying interpersonal relationships.

The core of their problems is often a grandiose, critical inner voice, which persecutes them by putting them down and making them feel they are never good enough. This perfectionistic part of the personality might also devalue others, so other people, too, are not good enough. Both of these strategies protect them from feeling vulnerable and afraid.

These people tell me they need to build a stronger, more cohesive sense of self. By becoming more accepting of themselves they become more accepting of others and are enabled to cultivate healthier, more satisfying relationships.

Problems related to meditation and spiritual practice

Spiritual conflicts arise due to the use of prayer, meditation, and other spiritual practices. The use of these practices, either in formal settings or on one’s own, often activates unresolved emotional issues. We are challenged to face long-standing issues concerning self-esteem, sexuality, power, and dependency.

Spiritual practice may also stimulate specific syndromes: mystical experience with psychotic features; inflation of the ego; splitting between "higher" and "lower" dimensions of the psyche; kundalini experiences; psychosomatic reactions; and the dark night of the soul.

The psychotherapy of spiritual conflicts requires that the therapist understand the various stages of the spiritual path, the states of consciousness associated with the spiritual Self, as well as the various forces and powers of the unconscious mind.