I see many people in my practice that struggle with issues that are deeply personal and deeply troubling. Oftentimes, that hurt is buried deeply and left nameless, yet in desperate need of needing to be named and acknowledged. To that end, I’ve decided to write some brief statements on issues that you might be personally going through with the intent of creating a dialogue about what may be occurring in your life. Please free to look over the areas of specially listed in the menu above that you feel drawn towards, or even topics that impact your friends, family, or partners.
How people change, and how we evolve and grow, is a unique and personal experience that is often hard to describe. You might know that you want to grow, that you want to change, but you yourself might not know what you want to grow into, or what that change will look like. It is frightening because it is a step into the unknown, and into a new way of being.
Sometimes situations push us to grow, and sometimes we grow unexpectedly over the course of our lives. However, when a person comes to the realization that they want to grow, not simply by chance, but from their own will, then therapy can be of tremendous benefit. Having another person challenge, encourage, push, and pull you towards a new way of being in the world, a new way of being with others, and a new way of being with yourself, makes it less scary, and more achievable.
If you want to grow, then I will meet you in your strength and help you move forward. I’m here for you.
Healing the hurt from sexual assault requires bravery and strength, both to share your story, and to find your voice. This group seeks to create that confidential, trusting, and safe place where men who have experienced sexual assault can find support, assistance, and begin the healing process with other men.
This group is planned to start twice a year (i.e. one group starting in January and another starting in July), and is a planned closed group. What that means is that once that group starts, no new persons will be added to the group. This is done to support both individual and group processes of sharing and growth.
If you are interested in participating in this group, please contact me, Brady, about your desire to attend, your concerns, and to see if this group is right for you at this time.
It can feel uncomfortable talking about your more private and intimate moments, especially to a stranger. However, therapeutic treatment can help you identify the problematic aspects of your sex life while still respecting your full identity, and supporting you as a sexual being. Whether you are male or female, gay or straight, monogamous or polyamorous, or from a non-mainstream sexual background, treatment will be designed to help you address what’s causing your discomfort.
Talking with a trained therapist about your sex life and relationships can help you gain clarity and an understanding of how you are in a relationship and help you come to understand what is healthy for you. I approach treatment from a sex-positive position and will support you in defining and building a healthy sex life.
The need to have love can lead to staying in unsatisfying relationships, enduring physical or emotional abuse, giving up family relations and friendships to focus on one’s romantic partner, abandoning a career to spend more time in a relationship, or even risking one’s health or safety to keep a relationship alive. Men and women can struggle with this supposed need to have an intimate relationship and can spend most of their lives simply being in a relationship, going from one relationship to the next, without any time being single, and with a deep seated and intense fear of being alone. These, and many more examples, are the consequence of having an unhealthy relationship with love.
Love can be a wonderful thing, however, it can sometimes cause more problems than we want to admit, or problems that we are only starting to see. Changing one’s understanding of love, and learning to build a love life that is honest, fulfilling, and deeply satisfying, is not easy work, but with help, it is possible.
In pursuing sex, sometimes the relationships and the sex that a man is having can look like compulsive sexual behavior, obsessive searching for sexual partners, devaluing sexual partners, anonymous and dangerous sexual encounters, frequently regretful sexual acts, and it can look like work. Sex needn’t be work; however, it takes a tremendous amount of strength and courage to acknowledge one’s sex life and intimate relationships, and to change them.
Coming to terms with one’s sexual activities, sense of one’s self, and pattern of sexual behavior, is not an easy thing for a man to do.
If want to regain control over your sex life, if you want to redefine yourself and understand how your identity plays an important part of your relationships, then you may need some help to get back in control and build a sex life, and a life, that feels right. You have a right to feel better.
Sexually compulsive behavior, sexual “anorexia” or withdrawal, sex shaming, sexual abuse, or seeking out abusive partners, are all deeply personal problems. As a woman, your body, and your choices about your body, as well as your feelings about sex, and feelings during sex, are all vitally important. They are yours to discover and explore. What lies at the root of your sexual, and therefore personal, problems, is something that can’t be told to you by experts, but something that experts can empower and support you in discovering.
Finding the empowerment and ability to reclaim one’s sexuality is necessary for building intimate and honest relationships. As a woman, your decision to seek out help is a brave one, and it is a personal journey that will help you find your way to being close to others, and being close to yourself.
Problems for gay men can arise from feeling forced to behave in a way that is dishonest, from familial pressure to act in a certain way, from societal oppression and devaluing, and from the natural process of having loving and intimate relationships. For a man to love another man, and to accept love from another man, challenges many societal notions about identity and love, and it also may challenge one’s personal beliefs about love, family, belonging, and identity. From this, gay men oftentimes struggle with understanding and building a sexual life that is true to themselves, and also fulfilling.
With all of these pressures, forces, and combative elements acting on the lives of gay men, some gay men attempt to find comfort in their lives in the best ways that they can. Gay men are therefore at risk for drug addiction, sexually compulsive behavior, depression, even suicide, and as men, they may feel alone in addressing these problems.
With all of these risk factors, it is necessary, and truly important, for gay men to not feel alone with their problems, to have support, to find their voice, to reclaim their strength, and to feel worthy and capable of having the life that they want to have. It is a brave and courageous act for gay men to seek out their own happiness, and to ask for help along the way.
Many spouses and partners feel responsible, somehow complicit, blameworthy, or even ashamed about having a loved one undergo sexual problems. While one’s partner or spouse begins the process of getting help, making changes, and growing, change will occur throughout many aspects of their and your life. As a supportive and loving spouse and partner, it is important for you to be aware that change will occur in your relationship and your ability to accept that change, and allow your partner to grow, will be a difficult and stressful task for you.
In times of great stress, which this is, it is important to have a supportive and empowering partner to go through the worst of it with, and you can be that partner. You don’t have to be the strong one all the time, nor do you have to make all the changes, but you can be there for your spouse and partner as they struggle to find a new way to be in this world, and a new way to express their love. Change can happen, especially when working together.
Is it hard to get out of bed in the morning? Does having little energy to get through the day hold you back from doing what you want to do? Do you feel sad or cry almost every day? Are you sensitive to the criticism of others but you are more down on yourself than anyone else is?
Depression is a serious condition and getting appropriate treatment helps. Treating depression requires addressing those disturbing thoughts, tackling unresolved problems, building health self-esteem, and creating new strategies for how to live your life the way that you want to. Preventing depression from coming back also means learning mindfulness techniques that aid in removing the debilitating symptoms of depression.
Feeling down is a natural part of life. However, when feeling sad and down won’t seem to lift, it may be time to seek treatment. Therapy can help you overcome your personal obstacles, improve your mood, and put you back in control of your life.
Fear of rejection, inability to focus, staying awake irregularly, sleeping irregularly, pushing others away, or having the tendency to put one’s self in harmful situations, might be part of your creative process. It might also mask true hurt that you acknowledge yet fear addressing, out of fear that it would hamper your creative processes.
Healing old wounds, becoming clearer with one’s emotional understanding, strengthening one’s communication skills, deepening one’s insight, while not losing the creative aspects of one’s self, is possible. Healing can allow you to become a clearer instrument for your work.
Going through a breakup or a divorce is rarely easy, and yet, this is a time of great potential growth and renewal. Some people, after a breakup, really want to spend time on her or himself, to grow, and find a renewed sense of happiness. Those are not easy tasks to do alone, because facing the breakup, the loss, and one’s role in the relationship are often clouded by one’s personal blind-spots.
Your relationship, and the life and the world you built with another person are gone. Moving forward and rebuilding your life, having gratitude for the love that was there, acknowledging the hurt that remains, and not repeating patterns that do not serve yourself, is possible. It is rarely easy to move forward, but it is a difficult if necessary process.
Your grieving process, and your relationship to the deceased, is unique to you, which often makes it difficult for others who are also grieving to see your hurt, your loss, for how it impacts you as a person. Whether you can’t stop crying, can’t find comfort, or don’t know what to do with all of your feelings or what to do at all, help is out there; for we do not grieve alone.
Starting therapy to address your stress and anxiety can help you ease these symptoms. Stress and worrying might seem to be controlling your life and causing you problems in every aspect of it, with family, with friends, with work, and with your own personal goals, but it doesn’t have to.
Directly dealing with your stressful problems and finding workable solutions is the best approach to treating your stress and reclaiming your life. In therapy we can work together to reduce your levels of stress and anxiety with mindfulness techniques and new coping strategies.
Together, we can find solutions that work and help you manage your stress and all of life’s challenges.
Trauma can be physical abuse, sexual assault, witnessing murder, being violated, or being wounded in a way that is overwhelming and debilitating. In trauma, we might also blame ourselves, feel deserving of being hurt, seem unable to forget, rage at the world, twist the trauma as a natural event, want to escape the thoughts and memories, or want to bury our wounds deeply in the hopes that they stay buried. We might even think that we are irreparably broken, but I am sorry to say, you can find healing.
Your life is yours to live, and with that, you have the ability to excavate those wounds, to tell your story, and to heal. You may have been robbed of a sense of safety, trust, innocence, but with healing, reclaiming your voice, reclaiming control of your life, and reclaiming those lost pieces can happen.
There are many reasons that would lead a couple to seek counseling. Playful banter can become a little too sarcastic. Mutual friends can be intrusive and critical of your relationship. Sometimes, one partner can have an affair.
Couples counseling can help each of you negotiate relationship issues, learn new ways to express your feelings and ideas, and find a better way to work together. With me, couples counseling is a place for each person to be heard and for each person to take responsibility for the relationship.
I’ve counseled opposite and same sex couples, pre-marital/married/non-married partnerships, single persons in relationships, and open and closed relationships; every relationship has its unique advantages and challenges. I have a sex-positive theoretical orientation and hope that you feel comfortable in therapy while you are sharing your most personal stories. Couples counseling can help you grow, rediscover the rewards and joys of your relationships, and help you understand clearly what you want from your relationship.
Infidelity can be a single occurrence, or it can happen multiple times over the course of a single relationship. When it occurs, and each time it may have occurred, pain and hurt ripples through all parties, for infidelity isn’t an isolated issue only affecting one person. Addressing infidelity means addressing the hurt, the pain, the impact, and the dynamics of the relationship that has been harmed by it.
There is loss that occurs with infidelity: loss of trust, loss of security, loss of safety, and maybe the loss of the relationship itself. Deciding to rebuild a relationship together, or to work alone to have this not happen again, requires working on the issues at the root of the infidelity, taking a strong commitment of honesty, and willingly enduring the long and difficult process of repair. With help, and with effort, the past can be healed to allow for a better present.
Going through a breakup or a divorce is rarely easy, and yet, this is a time of great potential growth and renewal. Some people, after a breakup, really want to spend time on her or himself, to grow, and find a renewed sense of happiness. Those are not easy tasks to do alone, because facing the breakup, the loss, and one’s role in the relationship are often clouded by one’s personal blind-spots.
Your relationship, and the life and the world you built with another person are gone. Moving forward and rebuilding your life, having gratitude for the love that was there, acknowledging the hurt that remains, and not repeating patterns that do not serve yourself, is possible. It is rarely easy to move forward, but it is a difficult if necessary process.
Having spent over four years specializing in therapy for persons 16-30 years old, at Haight Ashbury Psychological Services and Bayview Hunters Point Foundation School Based Services, I am sensitive to the unique needs and dynamics during this time in your life. Building self confidence, coping with a recent traumatic event, navigating parental relationships as an adult, or learning why others think you may have a problem, are all possible when working with a therapist.
Going to therapy may be your decision, your families decision, or even the courts decision, but it is an opportunity to grow and define your own life goals. Therapy is a process that allows you to learn more about yourself, better express to others what is going on inside, and find new ways to cope with what’s happening in your world.
What you want from therapy is fully up to you. We can work together to get you what you want.
Sometimes it can be hard building relationships outside of one’s family, and sometimes it can be hard having relationships with one’s family. For both, learning what it is you want from your relationships, clearly communicating in your relationships, and admitting when you have outgrown relationships is a painful process. Frequently, family and friends may want you to stay the way you are, and they might not want any change in the relationship at all. Luckily, one person can change a relationship; one person can also end a relationship.
When navigating friendships and family relationships, it is important to know what all of your options are, and all of the different ways that you can be with others. For many of us, school didn’t teach us how to be with people, and this is the stuff we most want to learn.
Having a therapist on your side to help you figure out your relationships, can make your life easier and more honest. You can build the life and relationships that you want.
Many friends and family members can feel responsible, somehow complicit, blameworthy, or even the cause of what their loved one is going through. It is important to remember that as a loving and supportive person in their life, your ability to listen, to spend time with, and to appreciate the perspective of your loved one is essential to strengthening your relationship with them.
When many young adults are gaining more independence, it is often thought that they are separating themselves from you. What is more accurate, and I believe more honest, is that they are finding more adult ways to be close to you.
Seeing your loved one as an adult, honoring their personhood, and seeing them for who they are, not simply who they were, takes love and willingness. Family and friends of young adults are pivotal to their well-being, because with them, they discover who they are.