Our Core Services

Here are some of the psychotherapy services we offer in our practice:

Individual Therapy
Couples Therapy
Group Therapy
Career Counseling

Individual Therapy

Individual therapy lays the foundation for significant personal change and growth. We build a trusting working relationship over time in our in one-to-one meetings. Our good working relationship is pivotal to helping you explore your past and develop greater perspective about it, improve your present day life and build your strength at handling it, and prepare for the future you want.

By examining the beliefs that guide your life and evaluating them for how they do— or don’t— reflect your best interests, you’ll begin to see how change and growth happens. The new ideas and principles you'll learn will give you the basis for how to make a difference in the direction of your life. Adapting Pascal’s "I think, therefore I am," we might say "my beliefs direct my choices and so my life."

Individual therapy provides a powerful way to interfere with the negative beliefs and behavior patterns that don’t serve you while offering healthy, practical, alternative ones that do.

In our approach to psychotherapy, we strongly encourage your candor and forthrightness. And your therapist, although diplomatic, will be direct with you and will challenge you. The trust and interactive nature of the therapy relationship helps you achieve a wide range of goals, adapts to your increasing abilities and needs, and stays with you as long as you want.

"I have made tremendous changes working with Marcia. My life has been greatly improved by our relationship and our work together."

—A married father of two children

Couples Therapy

Couples therapy is a vehicle for couples to address a variety of issues and grow in many ways. Couples have used our work together to:

Enrich the Closeness of their Relationship

Couples therapy can teach couples skills, approaches, and treatment for making a basically good relationship even better. This often involves practicing more effective communication with partners.

Make Decisions Collaboratively

It can be used by couples who want to explore an upcoming decision together. All couples have some trouble making decisions. Having a forum where you can state your different needs respectfully and without fighting helps you move to a decision.

Reduce Hurt and Fighting

Sometimes people who are close to each other get each other going, and then they sometimes find it hard to stop fighting. Many couples come to couples therapy because they want help to stopping fighting. They also want to learn better how to make up from fights. Couples who are having trouble but who wish to stay together learn through therapy to communicate more effectively, minimize blaming, reduce their fighting, and make up.

Couples therapy, however, is not a place or time to fight or criticize your partner. It is often a time to learn to establish and practice a style of communicating that enhances and promotes the love between the two of you.

Lay Healthy Groundwork Together as a New Couple

New couples learn to collaborate and negotiate while maintaining their warmth toward each other, and to eliminate hurt and disappointment before it starts. For many new couples, therapy at this stage of their relationship helps reduce anxiety.

Reduce Uncertainty about Staying Together

When couples are not sure if they want to stay together, couples therapy can help them understand their needs, conflicts, and process so that a thoughtful decision can be made.

Minimize Pain around Parting

Breaking up surely is hard to do. But some couples use couples therapy to help them manage their hurt and anger so that they can break up in a way that is less acrimonious. Parents who need to split up can make the separation process less traumatic for both themselves and their children.

"Marcia has worked with me and my wife, and we learned greatly about communicating, anger management, compassion, and empathy."

—A young husband in his 30's.

Group Therapy

In Group therapy, members improve their communication styles and become more comfortable in how they relate to other people. Group therapy provides you with a safe place to get meaningful and candid feedback on how you come across. It is an excellent place to test out your new interpersonal strengths.

"In group therapy I learn how I come across to other people and examine what might get in the way of having a healthy dating relationship."

—A single woman in her 40's

Career Counseling

Job Hunting and Career Counseling

Searching for a job or changing a career can be a lonely, anxious, challenging experience.

The loss or lack of a job with a sufficient salary raises financial security concerns and leaves us with less support at a time when we need it even more. We fear lagging behind in our field or with relevant technology.

To make matters worse, job-seeking or career-changing can bring out self-recrimination, self-doubt, and confusion about career direction. In this state of mind, it's harder to connect with friends and colleagues, hard to maintain and develop a network, and challenging to present yourself well to employers.

Collaborative Psychotherapy offers job hunt training and career counseling to help you learn how to identify the position or career you want, locate your new position or career, and work through difficult work or job search issues.

Career counseling teaches you the nuts and bolts of job searching, such as resume development, networking, and LinkedIn skills. It also gives see you the opportunity to practice how you come across and to get critical feedback, support, and encouragement about how you can improve your self-presentation.

Depending on your needs, we can combine the career counseling with some therapy work to help you better manage the difficult feelings around job loss and job searching, so that you are better emotionally prepared, come across at your best, and land the job you’re seeking more quickly and with less stress.

We work with people in all different fields and are particularly sensitive to the following:

Needs of creative people
Those with multiple interests
Those who don’t feel they "fit" conventional jobs or roles
Entrepreneurs and self-employed people
Job seekers who want to improve society and/or the environment
Those ascending a corporate ladder
People seeking meaning in their work

Work Issues

Since work is, for most people, the source of their livelihood, when there are issues at work" not getting along the boss or other key players, not liking the work, miserable work culture, needing more recognition but not sure how to get it, too much insecurity related to reorganizations, mergers, etc." the impact can create issues huge strategic and emotional trouble. Through talking over the situation, we can work together to gain perspective on the issues and needs and usually arrive at a strategy for going forward as well as ways to handle your feelings.

Learn about our current job or career group program.

"Working with you has made it possible for me to be much more savvy about workplace dynamics. Thanks for all your help."

—A program director in her 30's