I work with men, women, and couples of every kind. But of the 200,000 therapists currently working in the U.S., some 75% are women, so it can be difficult for men to find a therapist of their own gender if they prefer to do so. If that option suits you, call me at 917-873-0292 to schedule a session, either online or in-person at my practice in Park Slope, Brooklyn. The consultation is free.
coping & thriving
Whether born male, or here by another route, we become men through processes we don’t fully control. At school, we often learn to repeat behaviors that don’t serve our well-being. In our families-of-origin, we can be trained to ignore feelings that don’t reinforce the aims of the group. In early relationships, we may get rewarded for shutting down aspects of ourselves that turn out to be important.
By the time you master one developmental stage, the next one seems to be well underway. The need for new learning never ceases, but we get little or no instruction for maintaining our mental health, or for navigating life’s curves. Whether we’ve already achieved a little or a lot, we all keep on learning to survive, to cope, even to thrive—often on our own, in a cold world. Therapy is made for that.
talking & change
Whatever is messing up your equilibrium now, whatever is most interfering with your flourishing at this point—that’s probably what we’ll be talking about. But it will be illuminated by your reflections on your past—and these, in turn, may come to make new sense in light of today’s experience.
Informed by a growing self-knowledge, you can choose more thoughtfully, being less impulsive. You can breathe. You feel more safe, and more free, than before. Change happens when you have the breathing-space to become more curious about alternatives than frightened of them. A willingness to be sad is linked to a capacity for joy.
work & achievement
Clients and I often discuss issues of motivation, creativity and blockage, career choice/change and opportunity cost, and decision-making. A very good job can provide enough money as well as enough meaning. The pursuit of either or both of these can be tough going, as obstacles emerge from outside and from within, to interfere with your efforts.
I do not believe “laziness” exists. I think most people yearn to work, but sometimes internal conflict prevents us from doing so. Together we can detect what’s in the way, and find where a bit of gentle pressure will destabilize the old holding-pattern and make new growth possible.
sex & relationships
Common topics include emotional intimacy and sex; orientation and gender; queerness and social space; bisexuality, and bi-invisibility; women; men; dating and its complexities; pornography, as a habit vs. a (self-defined) addiction; polyamory and monogamy; fidelity and non-deception; commitment and ambivalence; and all the processes and permutations involved in coupling-up—whether the goals of those involved are short-term, or as permanent as love can make them.
Lengthy or brief, a very good relationship can provide excitement and renewal as well as safety and security. We can talk about that process, and help you maneuver in the relational terrain of your love-life.
aging & death
Each of us owes a death to nature. We can pay it in good time if we learn to live while we are alive, and fully to show up amid the experiences that can equip us for the later-life developmental tasks we shall all face.
There is plenty of good, useful thinking and feeling to be done about death—that vast mystery, dusted with tiny stars of myth and insight from various centuries and cultures—that works best in a conversation. Therapy makes those eventful conversations safe, so that they tend to happen.
life & growth
As we age, youth culture becomes less available and less useful, though we have more need than ever for the good stuff it used to supply. A search is begun, or renewed, for this good stuff, in the form of connection to the past; to the globe and its peoples; and to the sources of the world, as we find them in nature, in the arts, in religious life, in family life, civic life, intellectual pursuits, athletics, and so on.
My work with clients is shaped by my background as a scholar of literature (mostly Ancient Greek culture and English poetry), on which I draw as we try to make sense of your experience. The old stories are part of what helps.
