How does therapy work?

Many people first come to therapy when they feel overwhelmed—trapped by painful thoughts, emotions, or patterns that seem beyond their control. In these moments, it can feel as though something within us is working against us, keeping us stuck despite all our efforts to move forward.

You may find yourself asking: Why can’t I change this part of my life, even though it causes me so much pain? Or, why do I keep ending up in this same situation—precisely the one I want to avoid?

Our instinct in these moments is often to seek some distance from our discomfort—to fix it, quiet it, escape it. The work of therapy, however, begins with a different kind of movement—not running to escape, but turning toward the discomfort, to ask what else it might be trying to tell us.

Why do we keep repeating the same mistakes? Why do we ruminate on our most painful memories, or linger over our worst insecurities? What is at work inside us—in our hidden, unconscious selves—that compels us to return to what hurts?

These are not rhetorical questions. They can mark the beginning of a serious inquiry.

Therapy provides the conditions to stay with these questions long enough for something unexpected to emerge—opening the door to a different kind of knowledge about yourself, and, over time, a different way of encountering the world.

Treating the Symptom as a Clue

The kind of therapy I practice—psychoanalytic psychotherapy—isn’t focused primarily on reducing or managing symptoms. Instead of aiming to suppress your symptoms, we’ll work together to ask better questions about them—uncovering their underlying sources, exploring their hidden logic, and discovering something new about the meaning they have in your life.

Therapy provides a place where you can speak, without reservations, to a unique kind of listener who is attuned to what you’re really trying to say. As you start to speak freely, you’ll find that you almost always end up saying a little more than you intended or realized. Our work will proceed by paying close attention to that something more that keeps showing up in your speech, tracing the patterns and connections that emerge there.

The possibilities for change and growth that this process opens up go far beyond simply “fixing” your symptoms. Real relief and transformation come not from striving to erase the parts of ourselves we don’t like, but from learning to listen to ourselves differently—finally agreeing to take all of ourselves, even our symptoms, seriously.

Clinical Methods

My work is grounded in the theoretical and clinical tradition of Lacanian psychoanalysis. That matters because different therapies silently assume different things about what a symptom is: some treat it primarily as an error to correct, a habit to replace, or a set of thoughts to dispute. A Lacanian approach starts from a different premise—that what troubles you is not random, and not merely “maladaptive,” but has a logic and a history in your life, even when it feels irrational or out of your control.

Because the unconscious is not something we control or “access on command,” this kind of work can be challenging: it often asks you to stay with what you would rather move past, to tolerate uncertainty, and to let surprising or uncomfortable truths come into view at their own pace. Over time, the point is to move from feeling dominated by these patterns to understanding how they are organized—so that change becomes something you can author, not something imposed from the outside.