Sometimes life gets really challenging and frustratingly difficult to change. Sometimes we can't find a way out of old patterns. And sometimes even if we have the support of loved ones, it takes more than a good friend to be able to change one's life.
Fortunately, good therapy actually works and you can stop struggling on your own. Exploring with someone who knows the depths of the human experience and how to facilitate long lasting change makes a real difference. I will not fool you and say it's an easy or quick process. Altering patterns that we have practiced for years takes time, but the good news is profound change is possible.
I am here to join you in an engaged and active way, supporting and facilitating you to know more of yourself and the world. Here is a list of issues I work with, but truthfully I write this list only so you might find yourself amidst it. In actuality, I work with a wide range of human experiences that goes beyond the limits of words and categorization. I welcome people of all ages, ethnicities, genders and sexual preferences.
Relationships can be a joy and a painful struggle, Sometimes, the person you once loved can feel like a stranger or even an enemy. Fortunately, couples counseling can foster concrete change and bring relief to old dynamics. If you are struggling with your partner and wish to feel like a team again, I believe I can help.
We all know how messy relationships can be behind closed doors. Bringing a therapist into your relationship for help and showing them the messiness can be intimidating. My passion and expertise is in fully exploring those difficulties with you and your partner, and helping you both find your way out.
Joining people in the depths of their psyche often takes us to the depths of ours. Although I greatly value psychological theory, I find the real difficulties in our work arise not from a lack of knowledge, but from the moments where we are unable to see, think and dream beyond the confines of the dynamic we are playing out with our clients.
If we are meeting people where they are truly stuck, we are inevitably joining them in places where they are scared of certain feelings, emotional memories and waking nightmares. In my experience, this requires living at the edge of what we as therapists can embrace and tolerate. We inevitably forget ourselves and play out unconscious enactments that are necessary in order to truly know our clients' inner worlds.
Consultation creates the safe space to dream these nightmares and inhabit the horrific realities that are consuming and numbing for client and therapist alike. Once we can be fully present to such emotional conundrums, we can slowly support our clients to live free from avoidance and the life sucking symptoms that come with such intrapsychic defenses.
As such, I believe in consultation that marries a deep exploration of what is happening with the client, with what is happening within us. Rather than an inquiry into what more could be said or done, I am interested in how our internal landscapes prevent us from easily joining our clients in their struggle. In my experience, consultation in this form is far more personally evocative and rewarding. By knowing something new in ourselves we are able to know something new in our clients, and that changes everything.
Tom Ogden, Donald Winnicott and Antonino Ferro have been the most influential practitioners in my own understanding of the human psyche and how change occurs. I am also greatly influenced by Hakomi, Emotionally Focussed Couples Therapy (EFT), Buddhism and non-dual teachings.
Weekly, Tuesday’s 11:30-1:00 in San Francisco.
In my experience, to do effective therapy is to be regularly scared and not know what to do. To join people in the depths of their despair, insecurity and powerlessness means we too will inhabit these realms. Finding confidence in the midst of these dark corners allows us to not just tolerate, but ultimately thrive within these experiences of insecurity and impotence. This ongoing weekly group aims to help inhabit these intense dynamics of clinical struggle with grace and effectiveness.
Sharing our cases and listening to other’s feedback is almost always emotionally provocative. The vulnerable experiences that invariably get provoked within us can be extremely insightful and helpful to the case, but we have to feel safe enough to fully share, explore and harness these inner experiences or ‘countertransferences’. Therefore it is invaluable that the group functions as a dynamic and secure team that can allow for us to communicate what is evoked. This vulnerable and honest exchange thus supports each of us to more fully share our clients’ struggles, as well as our own struggles as therapists.
Group consultation can easily become an over-stimulating experience as we are told by multiple people with varying ideas how we should be doing something different with our clients. In my experience we do not need more ideas about what to do with our clients. We need other minds and psyches to come to experience our clients anew and show us how to be with them in fuller ways.
Emotional safety within the group also allows the listeners to share their darker reactions, which are often keys to helping the presenter move beyond their current stuck or habituated situation with the client. Often as practitioners, we cannot see beyond our fixed patterns of relating. Our clients are scared to know something within themselves and we can be easily pulled into their defensive schemes and collude to avoid some horrible truth. An attuned and safe group has the freedom and bandwidth to be able to bring these unconscious corners into the light.
Contact me if you are interested in joining the group and we can further discuss if it is the right fit for you.
Having a thriving psychotherapy practice, doing what you love with confidence while being financially successful, can seem truly unattainable. But it isn’t. A good private practice internship can set you up to have all these things.
The training process to become a therapist is quite arduous, and it often leaves people doubting themselves as practitioners, and ill-equipped for the task of setting up a new business. To be successful therapists, of course it is important to develop strong clinical skills, but in my experience it is equally important to focus on our own self-awareness as well as building solid business practices.
In order to help associates develop these three areas, I marry a deep clinical exploration of what we are actually doing as therapists, with a personal exploration of how to build one's confidence and self-awareness as a healer, while concurrently providing a thorough review of the concrete marketing and business skills to fill your practice.
Obviously finding a supervisor who is the right personal fit is very important. If it sounds like I might be the person for you, call me and we can assess if we are a good match for one another.
I created Full Frontal Fatherhood as a philanthropic effort to support fathers and parents. By clicking the link below you´ll go to FullFrontalFatherhood.com.
Sincerely, Julian Redwood, MFT
