Gestalt therapy is a humanistic, present-focused approach that emphasizes awareness of your thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and environment as they arise right now. Although it is important to explore the details of past events and future anxieties, their importance lies in the idea that psychological distress often comes from unfinished emotional business, fragmented self-perception, or patterns of avoidance that interrupt natural experience. Rather than analyzing problems from a distance, the therapist and client engage in live, relational work that uses dialogue, embodied exercises, and creative experiments to bring awareness into contact with what's real and felt in the moment. The goal is to help clients become more fully themselves: integrated, self-aware, and capable of genuine contact with themselves, with others, and with life itself.

For further reading, I recommend Good Therapy’s brief introduction to gestalt therapy and how it works: https://www.goodtherapy.org/learn-about-therapy/types/gestalt-therapy

CBT works on the content of your thinking. You identify a distorted thought, test it against the evidence, and replace it with a more accurate one. It’s structured, usually time-limited, and works well at addressing a wide range of problems.

However, when we stay focused solely on the mind and its thoughts, we’re missing out on important information that appears elsewhere.

Gestalt therapy asks us to look past the story you’re telling and to pay attention to what’s happening while you talk: the way your voice tightens when you mention your brother, or the fact that you speed up when discussing something painful and laugh right after you’re finished saying it.

That’s the material that we work with because it’s something occurring right now, in the room, where both of us can notice and connect with it. Here, when you rush past the painful thing and laugh right after saying it, I'll ask you to slow down and say it again without the laugh — and we'll both find out what's underneath.

The first session is what’s called an “intake session,” where we’ll discuss what's bringing you to therapy right now, and what you’re hoping to get out of it.

I’ll ask you some questions about when things started, the shape of your life now, whether you've tried therapy before and how it went. The goal is to get a sense of what you’re carrying and what we might work on together.

We’ll also go over the therapy contract, which sets out the practical terms — scheduling, fees, cancellations, and confidentiality — so you know what you’re agreeing to before we begin.

That varies from person to person. Some people come in with something specific they need to explore and find what they need in a few months. Work that touches upon longer-standing patterns tends to take longer. I generally start clients weekly, since consistency is what builds the therapeutic relationship that’s necessary for the work we’ll do together. The frequency can shift once that foundation is in place. Most people have a felt sense of when something shifts for them, and when that happens, we talk about it and decide where to go from there.

Please note that scheduling priority is given to clients with recurring weekly sessions.