In Your Shoes

Would you like to connect with someone who “gets it?”  A therapist who has been where you are?  Someone who can empathize with you?  Empathy, just like painting, is an art and a science.  It has been shown to improve client outcomes in therapy.  Like great art, deep empathy involves nuance and complexity not necessarily seen on the surface of human interactions.  To paraphrase Carl Rogers, it rings a bell in the client and shakes loose what had previously been only dimly sensed.

If you want to learn about working with me, click on Testimonials. 

Advanced Empathy

Ed Neukrug created a list of “novel and creative” ways of advanced empathy.  These deeper modes of empathizing convey to the client that you feel the gravity of their experience.   A counselor might convey empathy using visual imagery, analogies, and metaphors. In addition, a therapist might use targeted self-disclosure, connecting with great literature or movies, and sharing of internal sensations.  I am committed to integrating deeper ways of empathizing into our therapeutic relationship.  Empathy is a balm more powerful than any drug, technique or force of nature.

Experience and Education for Empathy

What is counseling from the inside out?  It means a couple of things.  I have been exposed to quite a few excellent therapists as I have been in counseling to resolve issues and grow over the past 30 years.  Being in counseling is like an apprenticeship under a great therapist.  I have been learning how to counsel people for nearly three decades, usually from expert counselors, each with a different theory of counseling.  As such, I have been in your seat and I may well have been in your shoes.  When a counselor has this inside experience of therapy and adds to it a master’s degree in counseling, with its courses, practicums, and internships, then he knows counseling from the inside out.