AREAS OF SPECIALTY

- Women
- Children
- Artists and Creativity
- Dreams

WOMEN'S REPRODUCTIVE LIFE EVENTS

Experiences of pregnancy, childbirth and early motherhood present women with radical changes in their bodies, and these are accompanied by profound shifts in the mind. While the changes may be welcome and wonderful in many ways, they also often bring on extraordinary levels of difficult feelings that may be confusing or frightening to the woman - among them, worry, sadness, anger, fear, loneliness, helplessness, grief, exhaustion, pain. For some women, these feelings arrive dramatically and traumatically with a pregnancy complication or loss, or with unexpected troubles in the period of planning and conception. For others, the feelings may come in the post-partum transition, interrupting the healthy development of mother-infant bonding. And for others the feelings arrive more subtly, in the midst of a generally healthy pregnancy or post-partum experience, and have less obvious causes.

Given the elemental changes that occur within a woman during this sensitive biological and psychological period, it is vital that she manage and integrate her feelings and not become overwhelmed by them. An integrated depth psychological/mind-body approach to treatment of women's issues seeks to bring a greater level of consciousness to this complicated, transformative experience - and thereby make it a richer, healthier, more satisfying transformation.

In conjunction with her private practice, Patricia is affiliated with the Mind Body Institute's wellness fertility program. Find out more about the Mind Body Institute here.

Treatment Modalities:
Women may be treated individually or with their partners at any stage of the reproductive process. Post-partum women are invited to come with their infants.

CHILD PSYCHOTHERAPY AND COUNSELING

Child psychotherapy aims to provide a treatment environment that is welcoming and non-threatening, that encourages exploration and honest self-expression, and that gives children a safe, supportive, separate space in which they can process the powerful emotional and developmental struggles they are facing.

The treatment approach employs cognitive-behavioral interventions, including parenting education, for help in diminishing troublesome or dangerous symptoms. Additionally, it incorporates non-language-based methods with talking, in order to help children express the subtleties of their feelings, thoughts, moods and needs, even when they don't yet have words for these. Sandplay, art and play therapy techniques allow children to gradually integrate divergent aspects of their worlds by learning to communicate and cope with their experiences. In sandplay, children create pictorial scenes using a variety of figurines and a small table-top sandbox. The sandbox functions as a three-dimensional canvas onto which the child's inner state of being can be symbolized and represented. In art therapy, children are given a variety of tangible creative materials to convey pictures of their mental landscape. The resulting art projects become vital communicative links between inner/emotional and outer/physical experiences. In play therapy, children use costumes, dolls, and other appropriate toys and props to safely act out their struggles and conflicts, in the observing and containing presence of the therapist.

In addition to working clinically with children, Patricia has conducted research in the area of imaginary life in children and is sensitive to the role of imagination for people of every age in dealing with painful or changing life situations.

Treatment Modalities:
Children may be seen individually or with family members, depending on the unique needs of the child.

ARTISTS AND CREATIVITY

The creative process offers the possibility of expressing human experience at every level - emotional, physical, intellectual, aesthetic, spiritual. For many people, this process is highly problematic. It may be indelibly tied to powerful mental forces like mania, depression, addiction, perfectionism. It may make difficult or unrealistic demands, haunting the person who cannot reconcile the everyday needs of practical life with the desire to be creative. It may frustrate an artist locked in a deadening block. And it may be wrapped in fears of failure and of success.

Psychotherapy itself is a creative process that can put language to these experiences. It invites flexible thinking in order to make sense of the things that cause suffering or confusion. It calls forth images, activates the imaginative mind. Drawing from opposite forces of mental life - conscious and unconscious, emotional and rational, sensory and intuitive, verbal and non-verbal - psychotherapy attempts to bridge the different parts of personal experience and come to understand them as a whole. In this way it can become an important companion process for artists and others compelled by the creative mind.

DREAMS

Dreams draw from a reservoir of unconscious images, fantasies, ideas, and memories collected from personal, familial, cultural, and collective experiences. Dreams represent a complex inner language, linking the conscious world of the ego with less conscious or unconscious aspects of ourselves. Making sense of this language requires careful listening, an attitude of curiosity, respect for the images of the dream - and oftentimes, another set of eyes. The privacy and safety of the therapy setting, and the practiced hand of the psychotherapist, invites an exploration of the meanings in dreams, and of the relationship between dream and dreamer.

The depth psychological approach to dreams follows in the traditions of Jung, who viewed dreams as spontaneous, symbolic portrayals of the unconscious situation, and Freud, who viewed dreams as disguised expressions of unconscious wishes. Both emphasized the integrity and intelligence of psychic images, and the significance of imaginative consciousness in deeply knowing our minds.

At bottom, dreams - and the profound psychic imagination of which they are a part - remain mysterious, perhaps even sacred. As with bursts of creativity and original ideas, as with imaginary figures and related phenomena, the most we can do may be to stand witness and pay close attention.

Treatment Modalities:
Dream analysis may occur in the confidential space of the individual therapy hour, or in a small group context whose focus is the exploration and deepening understanding of group members' dream material. Please contact Patricia for more information about participation in a dream group.