I am pleased that you found your way here. It tells me that you are interested in your life going well.
The therapeutic relationship is like no other. I view the relationship between the client and the therapist as one of the most essential elements in the healing process. The client, in a sense, gets to borrow the strengths of the therapist until they learn to internalize those strengths for their own. Just having someone in your life who will not judge you, who cares about you, believes in your essential goodness and thinks well about you is an amazing gift. We don’t need to be distressed to really benefit from this kind of relationship. There’s always room to grow, find greater success, and become more connected to ourselves and to the people we love. The therapeutic relationship can teach people how to better do this in their own lives.
Here are a few highlights about my work...
Listening: Listening well is one of my strengths. I want to hear from you. I want to understand where you are coming from. And then I want to give back to you what I hear you saying, perhaps at a deeper level, so we can look at it together. Our work together is about gaining clarity about you. With clarity comes insight, and with insight, often comes movement, growth, transformation.
Support: I have a collaborative approach to doing therapy. You (or your family) and I are a team. I am a powerful ally for you to have on your team. I will help bring out the best in you. I will cheer you on, and support your dreams, and tell you the truth when you need to hear it.
Compassion: I have this radical view about human beings. I believe, given who we are, our personal history, how we’ve been hurt in this world, that each of us is doing the very best we can at every given moment in time. (Otherwise we would do better.) If we’re not doing very well, it’s because, for whatever reason, that is the best we can do right then. I’m certain that if we could do better, we would do better. This is my bottom-line working assumption about folks, because I have learned that if you let people have this, if you give people the benefit of the doubt, you very quickly begin the process of healing. What a relief it is to start from here. This attitude gives people a hand--it helps them to climb out of whatever dark or self-hating place they may find themselves in.
Respect: We have all been put down, criticized, judged, and worse, humiliated, disrespected, and hurt in so many ways. That we’re doing as well as we are is a testament to our resiliency, or some kind of miracle, really! But if only the people that mattered had treated us with just a little modicum of respect, we might be doing so much better than we are. Because what happens to human beings is that when we’re told over and over again, for instance, that we’re no good, or not good enough, we internalize that message and begin to believe that it’s true about us. Part of my work is helping people separate out what’s really true about them.
Please click on the links to see more about my work and offerings.
Warmly,
Ilene English, MFT