September 25, 2026
You have commitments to your friends, your family, your job, to countless bits of daily life and its challenges and celebrations. You take time away from those, maybe even leaving some of what is fun for you, to go to your prior therapist. She or he is a nice person, likely in an inconvenient office on zoom with a template background. Maybe part of a group or agency where there are so many other duties and obligations that the moment it is time,the Therapist is just opening their computer, seeing who is on schtheedule, and spending several minutes reminding both of you what you did before.
I know this isn’t every therapist, but I have trained people who have been stuck in this mode, and people who actively choose this mode.
You might have heard your therapist say, no, I really am different. Maybe you’ve heard about “an eclectic model,” and you worry after a while there is no particular method and this is jus a reasonably active listener with “lite” advice. You might have even heard your prior Therapist quickly the same thing as another provider, that there are goals for you to be seen, and for you to be safe. When you didn’t say anything about safety. You are safe; you want change.
Maybe you were given a worksheet but you leave the worksheet unfinished and are unsure of why you even came to the visit. Maybe you did your homework, or not, for this person, but it didn’t make a difference because five other people got the same worksheet from this person. Four others got the same podcast. As a former teacher, I know you only have to be one chapter ahead of your class. And that isn’t the best way to be an educator nor to be a Therapist. These Providers mean well but their “individualized” approach is just clicking on individual dropdown menus in a template in your chart.
After over a decade, I see countless Therapists who are just giving you a stale base cake from a store, with premade frosting and packaged toppings, and handing them to you while saying you are baking.
With me, you will know from the start that we are creating the recipe together. We are choosing the ingredients together and shopping from new multidisciplinary resources, not a “resource list”. I will see you bake the cake of your life yourself, refining each step, having fresh results each time. And you will have developed actual baking skills – life skills – you can transfer to other challenges and other goals.
Instead of secretly hoping a prior Therapist would cancel or run out of visits, working with me starts with the end result being planned from the first conversation. That end always stays in view, even as the recipe might evolve. That end result is by definition yours, not a template or a selection of canned frosted therapies. My work isn’t all about me, but together we will get right to work on your values, your preferences, your ingredients.
