WHERE THE WORK BEGINS
OUR APPROACH
Depth, curiosity, and sustained inquiry
Our work is rooted in the psychodynamic and psychoanalytic traditions — approaches that take seriously the unconscious dimensions of experience, the relational field between two people in a room, and the long histories each of us brings into the present moment without quite knowing it.
What this means in practice: we do not believe that people are sets of symptoms to be reduced or behaviors to be corrected. We believe that what shows up — the anxiety, the conflict, the impasse, the symptom that will not yield — is meaningful. It is communicating something. The work is the slow, careful, often surprising business of listening to that communication, in the company of someone who is willing to listen with you.
This is not a methodology applied from above. It is closer to a kind of attention. Bion called it reverie — the analyst's mind held open to whatever the patient cannot yet think alone. Winnicott called it play. Mal Slavin called it the art of psychoanalysis. They were all describing the same thing: a way of being together that allows what has been unspeakable to gradually find words, what has been unbearable to gradually find a witness, what has been frozen to gradually move again.
We also draw, where useful, on humanistic, existential, Gestalt, and trauma-focused frameworks. But the foundation is always the same — the relationship, the unconscious, and the patient time it takes for both to do their work.
PSYCHODYNAMIC
MINDFULLNESS
TRAUMA-FOCUSED
GESTALT
PSYCHOANALYTIC
EXISTENTIAL
TRAUMA-FOCUSED
FIELD THEORY
CULTURALLY SENSITIVE
RELATIONAL
ATTACHMENT-BASED
INTEGRATIVE
HUMANISTIC
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Couples, conflict, infidelity, the long undertow of disappointment, the difficulty of being known. We work with the templates, often laid down very early, that govern who we are able to love and how we let ourselves be loved in return. The room is for both of you — and for the third thing your relationship has always been.
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A central focus of this work, and one of Mal Slavin's deepest themes. Bereavement, anticipatory grief, the mourning that accompanies major transitions — and the older, often unspoken losses that have been quietly shaping a life. We sit with these things slowly, in their own time, in the company of another person. There is no rush.
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Developmental, relational, and acute trauma — approached with careful pacing, attunement, and deep respect for what a body has had to do to survive. Our orientation is informed by years of formal training in traumatic stress (The Trauma Center, Brookline) and by the conviction that trauma is not only what happened — it is also what could not be borne alone, and what can finally be borne together.
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Career shifts, parenthood and new motherhood, divorce, immigration, midlife reckoning, the loss of a parent, the question of what comes next. The crossroads moments when an old version of a self is no longer available and a new one has not yet arrived. These are not problems to be solved. They are passages to be witnessed.
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The persistent kinds — the patterns that keep returning no matter what changes on the surface. We work to understand not just the symptom but the life it has been protecting, and what would have to be felt and known for it to no longer be needed. This is the slower path, and the more lasting one.
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Race, culture, belonging, gender, sexuality, immigration, faith — and the ongoing project of knowing and accepting all the parts of who you are, including the contradictions. We work with people across the full range of identities and life experiences. All people are welcome here.