I am a psychiatrist specializing in psychotherapy. I have been practicing in Santa Barbara since 1985, with a current focus on the therapy of adults and adolescents.
Do you ever feel there are other parts of you, some that are confusing and take over in decidedly unhelpful ways? In contrast there are those truer and stronger hidden forces within your life waiting for a chance to emerge. It is those that I look for in our ongoing relationship.
In the same way I try to stay alert to how the creative forces within our connection also place new demands on myself, demands for me to change that I work to stay aware of and struggle to meet for a healing to occur in your life and sometimes in mine as well.
I see most people weekly and occasionally twice weekly for either brief (3 to 6 months) or longer-term (1 to 2 years) treatments.
To get a more immediate feeling for my personality, my ideas, and how I work, you can stay on this website and go to my video lectures on psychotherapy.
To best make contact with me, please send an email with my easy-to-use form.
An open letter to whomever is looking for me:
Your attempts to live a life closer to the essence of who you are, to find the heart and soul of yourself is a quest I too am on. Realizing that in our attempts to ward off pain our familiar self became a walled-in fortress and eventually a coffin, we seek a way out and a way forward to who we really are. My own search for reconnection to the spirit of my life has taken the form of being a psychotherapist to those trapped in that fortress and, as a result, feeling more and more unreal.
The videos on this website are my most impassioned discourses on this subject of coming alive. They all reveal my reaching out beyond Psychology to the arts, especially to poets. In this quest I have been deeply influenced by Carl Jung, and the many Jungian thinkers who carried forward his work.
It is important to me to find and reach those of you who hear something vital, familiar, and possibly even sacred to yourself in these lectures. A basic theme is that when we recognize who and what in the world’s life calls out to us and then step up and into those connections, we find not only an other but also a third intangible presence. It is as if an invisible guest comes in to join, address, and want something from us. Who this guest is and how he or she is to be welcomed is central to not only our coming more alive but also for those people, places, and activities it is our destiny to be with.
Feel free to contact me should you wish to explore these ideas further.
