Individual Talk Therapy

We all need someone to talk to sometimes.

We need a place and person with whom to share what’s going on in our lives, minds, and hearts. We’re not meant to bear the challenges of life alone.

Individual talk therapy is a source of support for you.

There’s value in talking about your challenges, hopes, fears, and aspirations (rather than just holding them inside). When we put words to our emotions and experiences, a different dynamic comes into play as we gain clarity and see them in a new way.

But talking isn’t therapy. It’s more than JUST talking…

When working together, there is always room for you to be heard and feel understood by someone who really listens to you. Sometimes just knowing you have a space to talk things through is reassuring, knowing you have support.

But there are other elements involved in better knowing yourself and working through difficult feelings and experiences. When we talk, we help you get in touch with your experience: your emotions, how you see things, how you feel things in your body. This helps start to “connect the dots” and make sense of what you are going through.

It’s all about perspective.

Speaking to things and not holding them alone gives perspective. Connecting with your beliefs, emotions, and sensations in the body also develops awareness and perspective. And when we build perspective, we get unstuck. We start to move through the barriers and the challenges to feel more fulfilled, more at peace, happier.

An example of this might be what happens when we start to understand and develop our boundaries. Without boundaries, we tend to take on others’ wants, desires, feelings, and intentions. We end up living our lives to please other people and make them happy, which in and of itself sounds like a selfless thing to do, but typically comes at the cost of our own happiness, energy, time, priorities, and needs. When we can understand our own needs and learn how to set and hold a boundary around those, we get a better perspective because we’re not so entangled in all of the noise of the demands outside of ourselves.

Getting perspective allows you to acknowledge the demands of the world you live in a while also getting in touch with yourself and your own needs so that you get to be included in how you live YOUR life.

Gerri* came to me, feeling overwhelmed and afraid.

She had been experiencing strange and confusing thoughts and emotions. It felt “weird,” and she thought she’d be “crazy” to talk to anyone about what she was going through.

A big part of what she valued about coming to therapy was just being able to talk things through. She appreciated being able to speak about her childhood and relationships… and how things felt on the inside for her. Being able to talk about these things made her feel lighter and less alone. Feeling less entwined with the things she had gone through, she felt like she could connect more with herself.

She felt at ease, knowing there was a safe place to share how she felt and what was going on in her mind and her life. This space was the beginning of a new sense of self-worth and confidence that will last her the rest of her life.

Before she stopped therapy, she said, “Just being able to talk about things helped me so much. I’ve learned so much about myself, and I feel like I can just be myself now.”