Beginning Therapy: What to Expect

Before We Begin

Therapy is unlike most other experiences in life, and it isn't always intuitive. Many people begin without a clear sense of what the process actually looks like or how change happens. My hope is that this gives you a feel for how I work so we can begin with a shared understanding of the process.

Therapy Is Collaborative

Therapy isn't something that is done to you. I often compare it to physical therapy rather than a massage. My role is to guide the process, but meaningful change depends on your willingness to participate. That means bringing in what feels important, staying curious, and continuing the work between sessions. What happens outside the therapy room is often just as important as what happens within it.

How We Begin

We'll talk.

I'll ask what brought you in, what you'd most like to understand or change, and a little about your history. Together, we'll identify a particular pattern or difficulty we'd like to focus on.

People often come to therapy describing anxiety, depression, relationship struggles, perfectionism, people pleasing, self criticism, or feeling stuck. These experiences are real, but they're usually only the surface of something deeper. One of the first things we'll do is clarify what we're actually trying to understand and change.

The Work

Once we've identified a focus, we'll begin exploring it in an experiential way.

Rather than only talking about the problem, I'll invite you to slow down and notice what is happening inside. You might notice an emotion, a sensation in your body, an image, a memory, an impulse, or one of the different parts of yourself. Sometimes what we're looking for appears immediately. Sometimes it takes a little time. Either way, we stay curious and allow your experience to show us the way.

The goal isn't insight alone. It's discovering the emotional learnings that keep the pattern in place and creating the conditions for those learnings to change.

Why We Slow Down

Much of what shapes our lives happens automatically. We react before we know why. We repeat familiar patterns without realizing we're doing it.

Slowing down helps us notice what normally happens too quickly to see. The mind begins to reveal its assumptions. The body remembers what words cannot always express. Parts of ourselves that have been working quietly in the background finally have a chance to be heard.

This is where experiential therapy differs from simply talking about our lives. Awareness becomes the doorway to change.

The Approaches I Draw From

My work draws from several experiential therapies, each offering a different way of understanding the inner world.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) helps us understand and work with the different parts of ourselves.

Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP) helps us process emotions deeply while strengthening resilience, connection, and healing.

Coherence Therapy helps uncover the unconscious emotional learnings that keep old patterns in place and creates the conditions for lasting change through memory reconsolidation.

Hakomi and Focusing use mindful awareness to explore experience as it unfolds in the present moment.

I also draw from mindfulness based approaches including Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), effortless mindfulness, and Mindful Self Compassion.

Although each approach has its own language and techniques, they all share a common understanding: lasting change happens through direct experience, not insight alone.

There Isn't One Right Way

Every person is different.

Some sessions involve working with an emotion. Others with a protective part, a belief, a memory, or something happening in the body. Sometimes the work is quiet. Sometimes it's surprisingly powerful.

There isn't a formula. The process follows what your mind and body are ready to reveal.

Realistic Expectations

Therapy cannot spare us from being human. We will all experience uncertainty, disappointment, grief, conflict, and loss.

What therapy can do is help free us from the unnecessary suffering created by unconscious emotional patterns. As those patterns become conscious and begin to change, we often find ourselves responding with greater freedom, flexibility, and choice.

The aim isn't to become someone different.

It's to become more fully yourself.