Individuals
The place of being between, suspended between the beginning and the end, can be a powerful inflection point in our lives. A place that can feel like being on a high-wire act for some, a desolate abyss for others.
Popular culture is rife with clichés about this middle passage, but for those caught in its grasp, it often feels like you are being called to something far beyond our ability to approach or attain. Or perhaps a return to and reengagement with themes, talents, and interests that we abandoned earlier in your life. A feeling of a promise to that needs to be kept, or an odyssey to find something worth making a promise towards.
Despite all the ample availability of books, talks, and thinking on this most important of places in the life cycle, it often is suffered in silence, secrecy, or desperation. I specialize in helping those caught at these crossroads.
As a former member of the entertainment industry employing cutting-edge technologies, I understand the unique concerns of these fields.
Tight delivery schedules, operating in crisis mode, last-minute creative and logistical changes – all of these can be part and parcel of a professional life that can feel at times like moments of triumph alternating with crushing punishment. Forging a professional life in these often unstable, high-stress and high performance environments has often been compared to going to war.
I have worked with professionals from multiple facets of the entertainment, finance, legal, and technology sectors – above and below the line, partners to second-years, founders to lead developers, talent to producers, creative directors to c-suite officers – and what I’ve noticed is not only the high performance demands that are placed on them, but that they place on themselves. All too often, not just for the sake of what seems like the pursuit of success, but apparent survival.
Whether you’re finding yourself coping with creative blocks, demanding show or product development schedules, long stretches away from home, boardroom and management politics, or considering a transition out of your industry, I am here to help.
Having voice and being blessed with talent that eludes others can often be a road paved with joy and agony – and often the two dance closely together. In working with writers, actors, artists, and musicians, I’ve found this dance of opposites is often served well by Jungian approaches.
Creativity and the creative act, the notion that everything is intimately connected to its opposite, the need for plumbing our depths through imagination, dreams, play, and art in every form – these lie at the heart of Jungian thinking and practice.
In working with the creative and the parts of ourselves that animate our creativity, we often discover that chorus of many different parts of the self, each singing over the other. Sometimes this can create harmony, just as often there can be a cacophonous roar that manifests in the form of creative depletion, performance fears, distraction and stuckness, or the feeling that our gift has deserted us.
I have extensive training and a background in Jungian analytic techniques, and am currently in candidacy at the CG Jung Institute of Los Angeles to become a Jungian analyst.
Beyond the relief of depression, anxiety, and the host of things we call symptoms in psychology lies another mode of working together – that of Jungian analysis. Often employing some thinking and techniques from its cousin psychoanalysis, Jungian analysis broadens the palette to go beyond family of origin and childhood to incorporate metaphors and imagery from mythology, art, physics, alchemy, and history. As such, it has been a favored way of engaging in depth work amongst writers, physicists, composers, and artists of every sort for a century.
It can provide a means towards engagement with deeper layers of experience that is often obscured by our day-to-day concerns yet also shapes them through our moods, fantasies, behaviors, dreams, attractions and repulsions. In analysis, the goal is not to provide symptom relief alone – although this can often occur – but to engage with these deeper aspects of mind and event in a way that helps one find and construct meaning and purpose. To some, it can be encountering the meaning and purpose of a recurrent pattern in behaviors and choices, relationships, and career. To others, as a way of helping understand, frame, or create a larger window of visibility – into an event, a chapter, or even an entire lifetime.
The focus is on exploration and transformation, and everything from dreams, imagination, and a deep confrontation with the often conflicting chorus of identities and complexes that exist within us are employed in analysis.
I have extensive training and a background in Jungian analytic techniques, and am currently in candidacy at the CG Jung Institute of Los Angeles to become a Jungian analyst.
It is sometimes said the event is not the trauma. Trauma is how we experience the event. And no two people will experience the same event the same way.
Sometimes this can be immobilizing and chronic, giving you a sense of being a passenger in your own life. Sometimes these events may be vivid and repeating, or dimly remembered but that continue to govern your daily thoughts, feelings and actions.
I work with those who have been touched or shaken by trauma in their lives. I completed a trauma studies certificate at the Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies as well as extensive training in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, a therapy focusing on trauma and ways to help enlist your entire being – body and mind – in helping to resolve it.
All of us have a core need to feel seen, heard and felt in all our fullness and complexity. Many of us have an unspoken sense of who we really are, and how we would like to show up in the world, if only we could get out of our own way. And we all deserve the richness of connection with ourselves, others, and the world at large.
There are times in our lives where this can seem easier said than done. Perhaps you are in one of these times at this moment in your life.
Where you might be filled with despair for the future and regret for the past. Where you feel stuck. Where arriving at a certain age speaks to you in a worried tone – like turning 40, 50 or 60, where it may feel like time is running out. Or you question how to fit into this human adventure, and life feels too narrow, too confining, and colorless.
Where you might find yourself in the midst of a personal crisis or monumental upheaval in your life. This can manifest in many forms – fading relationships that once nourished you, career or creative burnout, a recent separation or divorce, the last child leaving home, or the prospect of retirement, dealing with unrelenting depression, anxiety, inertia or anger. Or you’re afraid for your future and for those you love in the midst of environmental, economic, and political chaos.
I feel called towards helping individuals negotiate these chapters of change and transition.