Gestalt & Depth Psychology

Some of what brings people to therapy responds well to skills and structure. And some of it doesn't, because it isn't a skills problem. It's a question: Who am I underneath all this functioning? What do I actually want? This is the work for that question.

Gestalt: what's happening right now

Gestalt therapy is experiential and present-centered. I teach it at Naropa University, and it shapes how I sit in the room. Rather than only talking about your life, we pay attention to what's actually happening in the moment: the sentence you swallowed, the feeling that arrived as you said something safe instead. Awareness of what you're doing, while you're doing it, is where real choice begins. It's direct, sometimes playful, and it keeps therapy honest: no performance, no clinical distance.

Depth psychology: the questions beneath the questions

Depth psychology takes seriously what lives below conscious awareness: the images, symbols, and old stories that quietly organize a life. The same wall you keep hitting usually has a history and a meaning; approached with curiosity instead of judgment, it often turns out to be protecting something worth knowing. This is slower, richer territory: dreams, longing, meaning, the dark nights of the soul. I've had my own, and those experiences live in how I show up.

Parts work (IFS)

Internal Family Systems offers a practical map for this depth: the psyche as a set of parts: inner critics, protectors, managers, and the younger places they guard. In IFS there are no bad parts, only parts stuck in old jobs. We get to know them with curiosity rather than force, and what emerges is more self-leadership, less inner war.

Where it leads

This work isn't about pathologizing you, and it isn't endless archaeology. It's about building a life with real depth, real connection, and something that feels like aliveness. If you're willing to do the work, we're a good fit.