My Approach To Counseling

What I do as a counselor varies from person to person, but what follows is what you can expect from me generally. The purpose of my work, apart from helping you overcome the specific concerns you bring to me, is to help you become the very best that you can be, by maximizing wellbeing in your life. The “Purpose” of the Middlepath.com explains just what this phrase means. The introduction to Emotional Management, my spoken word course, goes into even more detail.

At our first meeting, you will tell me of your concerns, why you came to see me. After listening and making sure that I am the best person for you, I will describe how we can work together as a dynamic team, rather than me simply “doing therapy” to you. Ultimately, the goal of my counseling is for you to become your own guide on the path to wellbeing.

So that we are working from the same page, and to help enable and empower you to be self directive, I will share crucial information. This information is about how we all operate from an emotional and behavioral perspective. What I will share will be akin to an operational guide to your emotions. If you are okay with me and how I work, at the end of our first session we will decide when to meet again.

At our second meeting we will identify your core issues--dysfunctional cognitive, emotional and behavioral patterns that generally arise in childhood and youth. You may or may not be aware of these deep issues. You may have surface problems you are aware of, like not being able to make relationships work, or addictions; in all likelihood, your problems are reflections of core issues. Until our foundation is solid, there can be no real wellbeing.

To help get to your core issues, as well as to put an accurate and compassionate cause and effect context around your current problems, I will ask you to share your past with me. I am particularly interested in what happened in your childhood and youth. I am not interested in “slumming” in your past, over dramatizing it, but the past always influences the present, often helping determine it; and, what we cannot face rules us.

All of us have tender areas of unresolved childhood grief because life is inherently challenging for children. Kids have no real power—they don’t vote-- and not much ability to care for themselves. For some of us, the emotional consequences of what we faced as kids were beyond our abilities to handle, and they traumatized us. By carefully examining your childhood and beyond, you will see, without any doubt, that your dysfunctional patterns were not of your own choosing, not your fault. No matter what it may appear like on the surface, who, given a free choice, would choose to have serious problems of any kind? There but for the grace of fortune go we all.

Compassion is not merely about being nice! Uncompromising compassion is based upon how the human behavioral system actually operates, from a fact-based, cause and effect, scientific perspective. When the truth is told, there is nobody to blame!

On about our third session, I will begin to teach you emotional management, or EM. EM will facilitate and empower you to have feelings, rather than being had—enslaved--by them. With the help of EM, you will have the opportunity to get over your issues. With practice, in time, EM will enable you to become your own counselor on the path to maximizing well being in your life.

Even more important than a counselor’s method, is the relationship you have with her or him. Over the years I have served a wide variety of clients. My clients have included artists, both performance and otherwise, lawyers, college professors, blue collar workers, wealthy industrialists, students, and others. I work as successfully with women as I do with men. I love working with youth and enjoy working with the elderly. I have worked with gay men, lesbian women, and transgender individuals.

I love my work and consider what I do—serving people in a way that creates space for them to be the very best they can be-- both an art and a sacred trust. I am not the type of counselor who sits back in a detached manner and waits for you to open up. In part, I will make a difference in your life by inspiring you. As my client, you will hear, when appropriate, of my own triumphs and defeats, and what I have learned along the way as a human being who is, fundamentally, no different than you.