Does it seem like your usual coping skills are no longer working? While this can seem distressing and frightening, it is actually good news.  It means that you are ready to find a new way of being. It is at this point that therapy can help you find a wider and more flexible range of responses to your life. If you wish to develop more effective tools for relating to yourself and others, individual counseling is the right choice for you. After all, when it comes right down to it, life is about relationships.  

All of us grow up in some form of a family. It is in these first family relationships that you learn about how you should expect to be treated, how love is going to be expressed or withheld, and what you can dream of becoming in adult life. You absorb these messages automatically, like breathing the air around you. Depending on how these earliest experiences went, you develop coping skills to help navigate your world.

While some of these skills serve you well, others you may have learned as a way to protect yourself.  In adulthood these skills can become barriers in relationships or from knowing yourself more fully.

Old patterns of relating can keep you stuck in depression, anxiety, poor relationship choices, and a sense of not really enjoying your life.  Therapy helps you understand these patterns, where they help you, where they hurt you, and how to change them.

Contact:  email

Loralee Newman: 503.225.0319

Shari Levine 503.797.2709