Depth therapy · Kansas City & Overland Park
— Carl Jung
Depth oriented therapy with me is different than many types of therapy or counseling. My work draws on your inner world of thoughts, somatic-sensations, intuitions, memories and personal history to first understand what is most important and what you need to make and face the difficult areas of your story and life.
In many ways “depth” means exactly what you would imagine: to go more deeply into a topic, an issue, a person’s inner world, and a deeper way of living consciously. In a more therapeutic setting, depth offers the opportunity for an integrative process where the many parts of us — our bodies, intuition, instincts, heart, and even deeper thoughts — can become reformed and changed. In this way, depth in therapy is much like seeking the causes — as many as there are — rather than the symptoms and managing their difficulty. A depth perspective seeks to ask how you could be different and how you might want to be different before prescribing a fix.
My primary interest is working with the depth of who you are and will become — to help you relate to your inner and outer world. Your life has a story-like meaning to it, and you are the center of that story and meaning. Whether you like this or not, you are the biggest agent of change in your experience of life. I am here to support that development.
There are many ways a client can get support from a therapist. While I am trained and take trainings in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), Internal Family Systems (IFS), Attachment therapies, psychodrama, play therapy, and many others, there are some modalities for which I have gotten the greatest feedback and positive change — in my clients’ lives and in my own. For that reason I have come to specialize and use most frequently: Attachment theories (both childhood and adult / couples / Self), Somatic / Body work, Trauma work, Sand Tray, and Dream work.
And while these modalities are and can be helpful, their gifts come not just in them as theories but in our ability to find what works for you specifically. For this reason I treat my education as a painter would treat paint — there is no right color, but for your work there is a right combination.
Here are aspects of depth work:
Thoughts, images, dreams, loss, and what stays with us all day long in the background of any moment. Our inner life is not an unreal place unimportant to our outer lives; rather, it is our default condition — deepest fears and greatest hopes. Not only what is, but what could be, right alongside what matters most.
Sentiment is a nice house. A nice family. A nice job. But meaning is personal and deep — it offers us drive, passion, and a deeper reason to be not just alive, but in our life. In this way deep meaning is a superpower that fuels the greatest of life energies.
What shaped you developmentally is not old news. Family, attachment, injury, culture, and chapters you never got to finish did not just happen — they are the unfinished business of being you and living your life. Depth asks not just what happened, but what we missed that we still need now, or what we found that keeps us going.
Intuition, spirituality, aura, dreams, impulses, imagination, fantasy, libido, attraction, psyche, and spirit are just some of the names we give to the unscientific, less concrete aspects of life. In depth therapy we get to not only ask into these more gray areas, but learn to use and rely on them for security and certainty. Truly our uniqueness lives in the nuances of what we invoke in these deeper, less concrete ways of knowing and being.
No matter the work I do, no matter the training — the deeper of what is going on is always relevant to me. We can all see the book’s cover — but there is a story. And depth therapy with me is about reading, writing, and creating more from your story.
Related: Jungian therapy · Who I see · Dream work · Somatic work · Sand tray