A Therapist’s Notebook
Reflections on depth, healing, and what it means to do the inner work.
moon signs in depth therapy.
Most people arrive in therapy leading with their sun sign energy. The competence, the persona, the managed version of themselves they've been presenting to the world for years.
The moon sign is what's underneath all of that.
In astrology, your moon sign describes your emotional interior. Your unconscious needs, your instinctual reactions, the parts of yourself that formed early and quietly and have been running in the background ever since. Most people don't lead with their moon sign because most people don't have easy access to it. That's not a failure. It's just how the ego works. It manages. It protects. It presents.
Depth therapy is interested in what it's been protecting.
If you don't know your moon sign, you can find it with a quick birth chart calculator online. You'll need your birth date, time, and location. What you find might surprise you. Or it might explain something you've always half-known about yourself but never quite had words for.
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The first thing I've learnt about moon signs in the therapy room is that they hide.
Not deceptively. Not strategically. But the emotional interior, the real one, the one the moon sign describes, has almost always developed a way of staying just out of reach. A method of protection that became so habitual it stopped feeling like protection and started feeling like personality.
Sometimes the hiding looks like caretaking. The Cancer moon who has spent so long attending to everyone else's emotional world that their own sits largely unexamined. Not because they're incapable of self-awareness. Because somewhere along the way they learned, in that wordless way we learn the most important things, that their own needs were secondary. Inconvenient. A burden. So they made themselves useful instead. And the usefulness became the identity. And the identity became the hiding place.
Sometimes it looks like self-sufficiency. The Capricorn moon who learned early that emotions were not particularly useful. That what mattered was competence, getting on with things, not needing anyone in ways that might be visible or inconvenient. The emotional world got quietly managed and set aside in service of functioning. And they became very good at functioning. So good that the tenderness underneath, something soft and old and genuinely in need of care, has been waiting a very long time to be allowed.
Sometimes the hiding looks like motion. The Aries moon who processes emotion through action, fast and instinctive and forward-moving, staying in motion so that nothing has to be truly felt. The urgency to fix and resolve and get to the other side of something before it's been fully inhabited. The resistance looks like momentum. And momentum looks like health, until you notice that nothing is actually landing anywhere.
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Sometimes the hiding is more sophisticated than that.
The Virgo moon hides behind self-scrutiny. They feel things deeply and then immediately evaluate whether they're feeling them correctly. The inner critic runs constant commentary, finding the flaw before anyone else can, holding themselves to an impossible standard as a form of preemptive protection. The criticism is exhausting and it is, in its own painful way, a hiding place. If I am busy finding everything wrong with myself, I don't have to sit with the simpler and more vulnerable truth of what I actually need.
The Gemini moon hides behind language. Extraordinarily articulate about their inner life, able to name the pattern and trace its origins and describe it with precision, they can circle the feeling indefinitely without ever actually landing inside it. Understanding something becomes a substitute for feeling it. The insight is real. And it keeps the moon sign, the raw unmediated emotional interior, just far enough away to be safe.
The Aquarius moon hides behind analysis. Emotionally most comfortable at a slight remove, observing and understanding the pattern from a thoughtful distance. Genuinely curious about human emotion as a phenomenon. What's harder is being a human in the middle of one. The observer seat is comfortable and it is also, not necessarily, the whole of who they are.
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And then there are the moon signs that don't hide so much as contain.
The Scorpio moon feels everything at a depth that can be genuinely overwhelming. And shares almost none of it. I know this one from the inside. The guardedness isn't coldness. It's the result of feeling so much, so intensely, so completely, that exposure has always felt like too great a risk. Scorpio moon becomes the container, self-contained and privately turbulent in ways that almost nobody sees. The work is almost entirely about trust. Not trust as a concept to be discussed but trust as something to be slowly and carefully built inside the therapeutic relationship itself. When it happens, when something genuinely unguarded surfaces, it is one of the most significant things that can happen in the room.
The Pisces moon contains in a different way. They absorb and merge and feel their way into other people's experience with a porousness that can be beautiful and exhausting in equal measure. And when the feeling becomes overwhelming, the escape routes become familiar: fantasy, dissociation, losing themselves in someone else's reality. Not hiding exactly. More like dissolving. The sensitivity is never the problem. The problem is the absence of enough internal ground to stand on when the feeling gets big.
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What I'm actually listening for, when a client mentions their moon sign, isn't a personality profile.
I'm listening for the particular shape of their protection. The specific way their emotional interior has learned to stay just out of reach. Because that shape, whatever it is, caretaking or self-sufficiency or motion or criticism or analysis or guardedness or dissolution, is almost always the first thing we're working through together.
Not to dismantle it. It was built for reasons. It kept something safe that needed keeping safe.
But to get curious about it. To ask what it's been protecting. To find out what might be possible if it felt safe enough, finally, to let something through.
sun signs in depth therapy.
Most people know their sun sign. Fewer know their moon sign. And almost no one thinks about what either of them might mean in a therapy context.
This post is about that.
In astrology, the Big Three are your sun sign, your moon sign, and your rising sign. Your rising sign is how others perceive you on first meeting. Your sun sign is your conscious identity, your ego, the version of yourself you present to the world. Your moon sign is your emotional interior, your unconscious needs, the parts of yourself that only come out when your guard is down.
When clients bring their birth charts into the therapy room, as a depth therapist, I'm the most interested in the moon sign. But the sun sign tells me something important too. Usually about what we're working through to get there.
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The sun sign is the ego structure. The conscious identity. The way someone has learnt to present themselves to the world, the part that walks into the therapy room first and stays in control the longest.
Which means in depth therapy, the sun sign often shows up as the presenting self: competent, managed, articulate. It shows up as the defense structure, the way the ego protects what's underneath. It shows up as resistance, because the ego's job is to maintain the status quo. And sometimes it shows up as what Jung called the persona, the mask we wear so successfully we sometimes forget it's a mask.
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Consider the Aries sun. They arrive with energy, with clarity about what needs to change, with a certain impatience for the process. The ego says: I've identified the problem, let's solve it. That drive is real and it's a gift. It's also, in depth work, frequently a way of staying in motion so that nothing has to be truly felt.
The resistance looks like momentum.
Or the Libra sun. Extraordinarily attuned to the relational dynamic in the room, careful about how they're coming across, skilled at saying the right thing. The ego has learnt that harmony is safety. In therapy, this can look like cooperation. It can also look like performing the role of good client while the actual feeling stays carefully managed beneath the surface.
The resistance looks like agreeableness.
The Scorpio sun arrives already knowing this will go deep. And arrives, paradoxically, more defended than almost anyone. Because the ego has learnt that being known is dangerous. The guardedness is sophisticated, layered, persuasive even.
The resistance looks like intensity.
And the Gemini sun. Brilliant, articulate, able to narrate their own psychology with striking precision. The ego has learnt that understanding something is the same as working through it. They can circle the feeling indefinitely, describing it from every angle, without ever actually landing inside it.
The resistance looks like insight.
———
This isn't about sun signs being problems to overcome.
The ego structure isn't the enemy. It's the architecture someone built to survive their life. It deserves to be understood before it's asked to soften. Respected, even.
But depth therapy is specifically interested in what the ego has been organized to protect. The moon sign, the emotional interior, the unconscious needs, the early formative wounds...etc., is what lives underneath all that management. And the gap between the two is often where the most important work happens.
When a Capricorn sun walks in, self-sufficient and composed and quietly skeptical that feeling things will change anything, and their moon is in Cancer, desperate in that private, inarticulate way for care they've never known how to ask for, that gap is the therapy. Not the presenting problem. Not the life circumstances. The distance between who they've learnt to be and what they've always needed.
When a Leo sun arrives warm and magnetic and performing their healing alongside everything else they perform, and their moon is in Pisces, overwhelmed and boundaryless and longing to just stop holding it all together, that distance is the therapy.
The sun sign is the map of who someone became. The moon sign is the map of who they actually are. And the work of depth therapy is, in many ways, the slow and patient and sometimes painful narrowing of that distance.
———
When a client mentions their birth chart, I'm not listening for personality traits.
I'm listening for the story someone tells about themselves. And what that story protects.
Someone who leads strongly with their sun sign identity, "I'm such a Scorpio, I'm very intense, I don't trust easily"...etc., is often, without realizing it, describing their defense structure as if it's their whole self. The intensity is real. But it's also armor. And underneath it is a moon sign that tells a different, quieter, more uncertain story.
The most useful thing astrology offers in a therapy context isn't a personality profile. It's a language for the gap. Between the outer self and the inner one. Between what we show and what we carry. Between the ego we've built and the emotional world we've never quite let anyone see.
That gap is where I work.
And if a birth chart helps someone begin to name it, to say "I think my Capricorn sun is why I can never ask for help" or "my Scorpio moon is why intimacy feels so dangerous"...etc., then the chart has done something genuinely useful. It's opened a door.
we see the best qualities in everyone but ourselves.
Have you ever met someone and felt an almost immediate pull toward them? Not just attraction or admiration but something more specific than that. A sense that they have something you've always wanted. A confidence you couldn't imagine having. A creativity that feels effortless in them and completely out of reach in you. An emotional ease you've spent years trying to develop.
And underneath the admiration, quietly, a belief: that's theirs. Not mine.
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There's a concept from Jungian psychology called the projection of your inner gold (something that we all carry within us). I'm going to skip the academic framing because the idea itself is simple and I think you'll recognize it immediately.
We all have a version of ourselves that we can't quite see. Not our failures or our flaws, we're usually very familiar with those. I mean the other stuff. The qualities, the gifts, the parts of us that are genuinely good and real and ours. Most of us have a surprisingly hard time seeing those directly. So instead we see them out there, in other people, and we feel the pull of them without realizing what we're actually responding to.
What you're drawn to in someone else is often a reflection of something you already carry in yourself. Something you just haven't been able to claim yet.
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I see this constantly in my work.
Someone describes a person in their life with this almost reverent quality: a friend who seems effortlessly confident, a colleague whose creativity feels boundless, a partner whose emotional intelligence feels like something from another planet. And underneath the admiration there's always this quiet, painful conclusion: they have something I don't.
Part of what I do is help people turn that around.
Not to diminish what they see in others. But to get curious about it. Because the things we respond to most powerfully in other people, the qualities that feel almost magnetic, are often the ones that are most authentically ours. The ones we gave up on claiming somewhere along the way. The ones we decided, for whatever reason, weren't available to us.
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Here's where it gets harder.
Taking those parts of yourself back isn't a single insight. It's not a moment where everything clicks and you suddenly see your own worth. It's slower than that and more uncomfortable than that.
For a lot of people, tolerating their own goodness is genuinely difficult. We're much more practiced at self-criticism than self-recognition. More fluent in our failures than our gifts. And when you start to withdraw a projection, when you start to see that what you admired in someone else actually belongs to you, it can feel disorienting. Sometimes it changes the relationship. Sometimes it ends it. Because you realize that part of what you were holding onto was your own reflection.
That's a real loss. And it's worth grieving.
———
When someone comes to me feeling stuck, or empty, or chronically drawn to people who ultimately disappoint them, I'm not only looking at their history or their patterns.
I'm also looking for what they can't see in themselves.
Because in my experience, the people who have the hardest time recognizing their own worth are often the ones who are most generous in recognizing it in everyone else. They light up talking about what they admire in others. They go quiet when you ask what they value in themselves.
That quietness is where the work begins. Not in fixing what's broken. But in helping someone see what was never broken at all. Only overlooked. Only given away. Only waiting to be recognized as theirs.
therapy in the age of AI and Chat GPT.
It might surprise you to hear this coming from a therapist but I think AI can be genuinely helpful for your mental health.
Not as a replacement for therapy. But as something real in its own right. A tool that meets a need that therapy wasn't always designed to meet.
I've used AI myself. Not instead of my own personal work but alongside it. And I've watched clients do the same. They come in having already talked something through with ChatGPT, having named a pattern they couldn't quite articulate before, having found language for something that previously felt wordless.
So before I tell you what AI can't do, I want to be honest about what it can.
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It's available when you need it most. Anxiety doesn't keep business hours. Grief doesn't wait for your Thursday appointment.
There’s absolutely no judgement. One of the biggest barriers to getting support is the fear of being judged. By a therapist, by a friend, by anyone. AI removes that fear entirely. You can say the thing you've never said out loud, the thought you're ashamed of, the feeling that doesn't make sense, and nothing bad happens. For some people, that's the first time they've ever said it at all.
It helps you find language. Sometimes the hardest part of inner work is simply naming what's happening. AI is good at reflecting back what you're describing in clearer terms. Offering frameworks, asking follow-up questions, helping you articulate something that felt formless. That clarity is real and useful.
———
Here's where I have to be honest in a different direction.
AI can't feel the thing happening between you. In depth-oriented therapy, one of the most powerful tools we have is the relationship itself. The way you relate to me in the room: the hesitations, the moments of trust, the times you pull back. These are live data. They show us, in real time, how you relate to people. That dynamic can't exist between you and an algorithm. It can simulate empathy. It cannot offer it.
It can't sit with what it doesn't understand. A good therapist doesn't rush to make sense of everything you bring. Sometimes the most important thing I do is resist the urge to explain. To sit with something confusing or painful and let it breathe until it reveals itself. AI is optimized to respond. It will always give you something. And that pressure toward resolution can actually work against the kind of slow, patient exploration that depth work requires.
It can't offer a corrective experience. So much of what shapes us happened in relationship. In early experiences of being seen or unseen, held or dropped, loved conditionally or unconditionally. And the healing of those experiences also happens in relationship. Not in conversation with a tool but in the lived experience of being genuinely met by another human being who is fully present, fully accountable, fully there.
So although confiding in AI can seemingly remove the fear of being judged, it also removes the opportunity for someone real to see you in what you are struggling with… which is a crucial part of the healing process.
There are some things AI simply cannot replicate. Not because of a limitation in its programming but because of what it is. A relationship requires two beings. Two presences. Two people with something at stake.
———
If you've been using ChatGPT to track your thoughts and feelings…keep going. There's nothing wrong with it and there's real value in it.
But if you've noticed that the same things keep coming up, that the clarity you find at 11pm evaporates by morning, that you understand your patterns intellectually but can't seem to change them…that's the signal that something more is needed.
I've learnt that understanding yourself is not the same as healing. Insight is the beginning of the work, not the end of it. The deeper shift, the one that changes how you move through the world, how you relate to the people you love, how you feel in your own body, that happens in relationship. In the slow, patient, deeply human work of being truly known by another person.
That's what I'm here for.
the part of you that doesn’t actually want to heal.
This is more common than you think.
This part tends to live outside of your awareness. Quiet, stubborn, surprisingly powerful. It operates beneath the surface of your conscious intentions, beneath the part of you that genuinely wants to get better.
It exists not because you're self-destructive. Not because you don't deserve better. Not because you haven't tried hard enough. But because it's doing something important. Something it learned to do a long time ago. Something it has never been properly thanked for.
This is about that part. And why, before you can truly heal, you need to understand it. Maybe even make peace with it.
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In depth psychology, we call it resistance. It's not a flattering word. It sounds like obstruction, like something in you is being difficult on purpose.
But that's not what's happening.
The part of you that resists healing is one of your oldest protectors. It showed up at some point (probably early, probably in response to something painful) and decided that staying exactly as you were was the safest option. It has been holding that position ever since. Faithfully and often invisibly, long after the original threat passed.
It's not wrong for doing that. It just hasn't gotten the memo that things have changed.
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Staying stuck often comes with real benefits. Not conscious ones, not ones you would ever choose deliberately, but real ones nonetheless.
I've learnt that you can't just intellectually talk yourself out of this. Because the part of you that is stuck isn't irrational. It's logical. It made a decision based on real pain and real experience and it has been faithfully executing that decision ever since.
If the anxiety goes away, so does the protection it provides. The reason you don't take risks, don't put yourself out there, don't try the thing that might fail. The anxiety is painful but it also keeps you safe from something scarier: the pain of trying and failing, of wanting something and not getting it, of hoping and being let down again.
If the depression lifts, you might have to start actually living. Making choices, taking up space, wanting things again. Depression flattens desire, and for someone who has been hurt by wanting things, that flatness can feel safer than the alternative.
If the relationship patterns shift, you have to become someone different. And however painful the life those patterns created, it's a known life. The person you'd become on the other side of healing is a stranger. And strangers, even promising ones, can feel frightening.
Therapists call this secondary gain: the unconscious payoffs of symptoms that make them harder to release than they logically should be. It doesn't mean you're not suffering. It means the suffering is doing double duty. It hurts and it helps. Both things are true at the same time.
———
When you've been struggling for a long time, the struggle stops being something you have and starts being something you are.
The anxiety, the depression, the wound. It begins to organize everything: the stories you tell about yourself, the relationships you enter, the way you make sense of the world and your place in it. It becomes, in a strange and painful way, familiar. A kind of home.
And homes are hard to leave.
Even when you know there's something better outside. Even when you've been planning to leave for years.
There is a grief in healing that rarely gets acknowledged: the grief of releasing an old self, even one that was suffering, even one you're relieved to let go of. Something has to be mourned. And the part of you that doesn't want to get better is often the part that is already in that grief, quietly, without anyone having named it yet.
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And then there's something even more tender than all of this. And I think it's the most overlooked piece.
Sometimes the resistance to healing has nothing to do with fear or identity. Sometimes it's about love.
The wound you carry is often connected to someone: a parent, a person who hurt you, a relationship that shaped you in ways you're still discovering. And healing that wound, really releasing it, can feel at some deep unconscious level like a betrayal. Like leaving them behind. Like saying it didn't matter. Like severing the last thread of connection to someone you still love, or still need to love, even if that love was complicated.
I've sat with people who slowly realized that staying depressed was a way of staying loyal to a depressed parent. That keeping themselves small was a way of not outgrowing someone who couldn't grow with them. That the wound was the last place they still felt the presence of someone they'd lost.
That's not pathology. That's love with nowhere left to go.
———
If you recognize yourself anywhere in this: in the resistance, the secondary gain, the identity built around pain, the loyalty to old wounds…I want to offer you something.
This doesn't mean you don't want to heal. It means you're human.
The work isn't to defeat that part of you. It's to get curious about it. To ask what it's protecting, what it's afraid of, what it would need to feel safe enough to finally let go. That conversation is slow and it doesn't always go in a straight line. But it's often where the most important therapy happens. Not in the insights or the breakthroughs but in the quiet, careful negotiation with the self that has been holding everything together for a very long time.
It deserves to be heard. Not overridden.
And when it finally feels safe enough to loosen its grip, even slightly, even for a moment…something becomes possible that no amount of wanting to get better could have forced.
That's the real work.
crying in front of your therapist.
You're mid-sentence when it happens. Your voice catches. Your eyes fill. And before the tears even fall, you're already apologizing.
"I'm sorry."
"I don't know why I'm crying."
"I'm not usually like this."
You reach for the tissue and look away. Embarrassed, exposed, maybe a little angry at yourself for losing control in front of someone you're still learning to trust.
What if that moment, the one you're trying to manage and minimize and apologize your way out of, is one of the most important things that can happen in a therapy room?
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Almost everyone apologizes for crying in therapy.
It's one of the most universal things I witness: this reflexive need to immediately contain what just spilled out. To reassure me that you're okay, that you're not too much, that you're going to pull it together now.
Where did you learn that?
Because you learned it somewhere. The apology for tears is never random. It traces back to an earlier experience of being too much for someone. A parent who got uncomfortable. A household where emotions were managed rather than felt. A message received early that your feelings were an inconvenience to the people around you.
The apology isn't just politeness. It's a window into exactly the kind of material that depth therapy exists to explore.
———
IIn a culture that rewards composure, tears get coded as weakness. As losing control. As something to be managed, suppressed, or at least saved for private.
But from a depth psychological perspective, crying in session is almost always a signal that something real has just been touched.
Not performed. Not managed. Not reported on from a safe intellectual distance.
Touched.
There's a difference and your body knows it even when your mind is still catching up. You can talk about grief for months without crying. You can describe a painful childhood with clinical precision and perfect composure. You can understand your patterns completely and feel almost nothing while doing it.
And then one day something small happens. A particular word, a silence that lasts a beat too long, an unexpected moment of feeling genuinely seen. And suddenly you're crying and you don't entirely know why.
That's not weakness. That's contact. Something that needed to be felt finally found a way through.
———
I've noticed that the people who apologize most urgently for their tears are often the ones who have been holding the most for the longest.
The person who has always been the strong one. The one who held everyone else together while quietly falling apart inside. The one who learned early that their needs were secondary, their feelings were burdensome, their vulnerability was a liability.
For that person, crying in front of someone, really crying, without immediately reaching for composure, can feel genuinely dangerous. Like something irreversible is happening. Like once you start you might not stop.
What's actually happening is something different. The part of you that has been standing guard for years, managing, containing, performing okayness, is momentarily stepping aside. And what's underneath gets to breathe.
That's not loss of control. That's the beginning of contact with yourself.
———
You could cry alone. And you probably have. In the car, in the shower, at 2am when the performance finally stops and there's nobody left to hold it together for.
But crying alone and crying in front of another person are not the same experience. Not even close.
What makes crying in therapy different is the witness. A specific kind of witness: one who isn't frightened by your tears, isn't trying to fix them, isn't uncomfortable with the silence that follows, isn't secretly relieved when you pull yourself together.
A therapist who can simply be with you in that moment, without flinching, without rushing, without making it mean something it doesn't, is offering you something you may have rarely or never experienced. The felt sense that your emotions are not too much. That you don't have to apologize for them. That they are welcome here exactly as they are.
That experience of being witnessed in vulnerability without consequence is not a small thing. For many people it is quietly revolutionary. It begins to rewrite something very old about what it means to feel, and what happens when you let someone see it.
———
Something often shifts after a session where real tears have fallen.
Not immediately. Sometimes there's embarrassment first, or exhaustion, or the urge to minimize what happened. But underneath that…something loosened. Something that had been held very tightly for a very long time got to put itself down for a moment.
Over time, the apologies get quieter. The reaching for composure gets slower. The space between the feeling and the managing of the feeling gets a little wider: wide enough, eventually, to actually feel what's there rather than immediately contain it.
That widening is the work. Not the insight, not the understanding, not the correct interpretation of your patterns. But the slow, patient expansion of your capacity to be with yourself. Fully. Without apology.
That's what becomes possible when you stop apologizing for your tears and start getting curious about them instead.
people who are in therapy but still feel empty.
Los Angeles has more therapists per capita than almost anywhere else in the country. More people here are in therapy, have been in therapy, or are actively thinking about going to therapy than perhaps any other city in the world.
And yet.
Something isn't working. Not for everyone but for enough people that I hear a version of the same thing with striking regularity in my practice: I've been doing the work. I've been in therapy for years. I understand myself. So why do I still feel like something is missing?
This is for those people.
———
The people who sit across from me carrying this particular kind of emptiness are almost always the ones who have tried the hardest. They've read the books. They've done the CBT. They've tracked their thoughts, practiced the breathing, identified their attachment style, and understood intellectually exactly why they are the way they are.
They are not lazy. They are not resistant. They are not broken.
They are, in many cases, simply doing a kind of work that was never designed to reach the place they most need to go.
———
Here's something that doesn't get said enough in therapy culture: insight is not the same as healing.
You can understand completely why you shut down in intimate relationships, tracing it perfectly back to an emotionally unavailable parent, and still shut down. Every time. With everyone who gets close.
You can know exactly where your anxiety comes from and still feel it arrive every Sunday evening like clockwork, tight in your chest, ruining the end of your weekend.
You can have years of therapy under your belt, a sophisticated psychological vocabulary, and a clear map of your inner landscape…and still feel fundamentally alone inside your own life.
This isn't a failure of therapy. It's a signal that something deeper hasn't been reached yet.
Because understanding happens in the mind. And a significant amount of what shapes us, the patterns, the defenses, the ways we learned to survive, doesn't live in the mind. It lives in the body. In the nervous system. In the parts of ourselves that formed before we had language, before we could think our way through anything, before we knew there was anything to understand.
Talking about those parts is useful. But it doesn't always move them.
———
In my experience, the persistent feeling of emptiness, even in a life that looks full, even after years of genuine psychological work, is almost never meaningless.
It is almost always a signal.
Sometimes it's the signal that the therapy you've done has been primarily cognitive, focused on thoughts, patterns, behaviors, while something emotional remains unprocessed underneath. Grief that was named but never fully felt. Anger that was understood but never given space to exist. A loss that was worked through intellectually but never mourned in the body.
Sometimes it's the signal that the therapeutic relationship itself has been too safe. Too comfortable, too careful, too much of a place to report on your life rather than actually live something different inside the room. Real therapeutic change often requires friction. Not harshness but the kind of honest, caring challenge that disrupts the very patterns you came to work on.
Sometimes it's the signal that what you've been calling "the work" has actually been a more sophisticated form of avoidance. Therapy can become its own defense: a place where you process feelings about feelings, talk about the past without letting it land in the present, stay perpetually curious about yourself without ever arriving anywhere.
And sometimes, perhaps most importantly, the emptiness is a signal that you haven't yet been fully seen. Not because your therapist wasn't skilled or caring. But because there are parts of you that haven't yet found the safety to emerge. Parts that learned early to stay hidden, to perform, to present the acceptable version. And those parts, the ones that most need to be met, are exactly the ones that tend to stay behind the curtain, even in therapy.
———
Depth-oriented therapy operates on a different premise than most approaches.
Rather than working primarily on thoughts or behaviors, it works on what's underneath them. The unconscious patterns, early experiences, relational dynamics, and unprocessed emotional material that quietly shape everything else.
It's slower. It's less structured. It requires a different kind of tolerance: for uncertainty, for not knowing, for sitting with something that hasn't resolved yet.
But for the person who has done the work and still feels empty, it's often the first time therapy feels like it's actually reaching something real. Not because it's more intense or more dramatic. But because it goes to the place that insight alone was never quite able to touch.
———
There's something particular about this city that makes this pattern more common here than almost anywhere else.
Los Angeles rewards performance. It rewards the curated version of your career, your body, your relationships, your spiritual practice, your healing journey. It's entirely possible to perform being in therapy the same way you perform everything else. To have the right vocabulary, the right insights, the right narrative about your childhood…and to have none of it land anywhere that actually changes how you feel at 2am when the performance stops.
I'm not interested in the performance. I'm interested in what's underneath it.
That's where the real work starts. And in my experience, it's where the emptiness finally begins to lift. Not because you've figured something out but because something that needed to be felt has finally been felt. Something that needed to be seen has finally been seen.
That's different from understanding. And it changes things in a way that understanding alone never quite does.
good therapy requires a therapist to choose you as much as you choose them.
What If Your Therapist Chose You Too?
Most people think therapy looks like this: you show up, you talk, the clock runs out, you pay, you leave. You feel a little better, or you don't. You come back next week.
I get why people think that's what it is. That's what we've been shown.
But that's not the kind of therapy I practice.
———
Here's something most people don't know: I don't work with everyone who reaches out.
It's not about availability. It's about something harder to name…like a pull. A sense that something in me is being called forward by this particular person and their particular story. When someone reaches out, I'm not just asking whether I can help them. I'm asking whether I'm the right person to sit with what they're carrying.
When that recognition isn't there, the most ethical thing I can do is refer them out. Not because they're not worthy of help but because they deserve someone who is genuinely moved by their story. And I believe they'll find that person.
This means therapy with me is a mutual choosing. You opt in. And so do I.
That's not how we usually talk about a paid professional service. But I'm not sure therapy (real therapy) has ever been just that.
———
I am a rational, science-informed clinician. I believe in research, in evidence-based approaches, in understanding the nervous system and the ways early experience shapes who we become.
And I also believe there is meaning in who finds who, and when.
I don't think it's random that you arrived at my particular door at this particular moment in your life. I think something in your psyche was ready for something… and something in mine was ready to meet it.
My clients feel it. They describe it in different ways: I feel like you actually care, or I don't feel like a number here, or simply, something happens in this room that hasn't happened anywhere else. I don't say this to flatter myself. I say it because I think it points to something real about what makes therapy work.
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Genuine empathy is not a technique.
It cannot be performed indefinitely without cost and it cannot be faked without the client eventually feeling it.
Real empathy means I am genuinely affected by what you bring into the room. Your grief lands somewhere in me. Your breakthroughs matter to me beyond the session. The work you're doing stays with me, because you are not a case. You're a person I've chosen to sit with.
This also means I have to continuously do my own work. My own history, my own unresolved material, my own blind spots…these cannot be allowed to crowd your space. If I notice that something of mine is getting in the way of being fully present with you, I'll name it. And if it becomes something I can't work around, I'll refer you to someone who can hold your work without that interference.
That, too, is what makes this not transactional. A transaction doesn't require that level of accountability. A relationship does.
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I won't pretend this is easy to convey to someone who hasn't experienced it yet.
The best I can offer is this: if something in you recognizes what I'm describing, if there's a part of you that has always suspected therapy could be more than what you've seen, that recognition is probably worth following.
Because the kind of therapy I'm talking about begins before the first session. It begins in the moment something in you reaches toward something more…and something in me reaches back.
That's where the real work starts.
what is depth therapy.
Maybe you've been to therapy before. Maybe you've tried something structured like CBT, worked through some coping strategies, and still felt like something essential was left untouched. Or maybe you're coming to therapy for the first time and you already sense that you want more than symptom management. You want to understand yourself at a deeper level.
If that resonates, depth psychotherapy might be exactly what you've been looking for.
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Most people are familiar with shorter-term, goal-oriented therapies. CBT is a highly effective approach for identifying and reshaping unhelpful thought patterns. It's practical, structured, widely used…and it's also one of the tools I draw on in my own practice.
Depth psychotherapy does something different.
Rather than primarily targeting surface-level symptoms, it turns toward the unconscious. The vast inner world of memories, emotions, patterns, and meaning that shapes how we move through life, often without our awareness.
Rooted in psychoanalytic and psychodynamic traditions, depth psychology holds that symptoms like anxiety, depression, or chronic relationship difficulties aren't simply problems to be solved. They are communications. The psyche's way of asking for attention, integration, and change. This orientation asks not just what you're feeling but why. And what that feeling might be trying to tell you.
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Depth therapy sessions are relational and exploratory. There's no rigid script. We follow what's alive: what you bring into the room, what emerges in conversation, what the body or emotions seem to be pointing toward.
Depending on what you're working through, I also integrate other evidence-based approaches to support the depth work.
EMDR, which is a research-backed method for processing trauma and distressing memories that may be stored in the nervous system. CBT, to help identify and shift the thought patterns that keep us stuck in cycles of anxiety, self-criticism, or avoidance. And somatic approaches, working with the body's sensations, posture, and breath, because the psyche doesn't live only in the mind. Healing often needs to happen at the level of the body too.
The integration of these approaches with psychodynamic depth work means that sessions can feel both grounded and expansive. Attentive to what's happening right now, while also making room for longer arcs of meaning and growth.
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Depth psychotherapy isn't for everyone. And that's okay.
It tends to be a particularly good fit for people who feel like they've "done the work" but something still feels unresolved. People who are drawn to questions of identity, purpose, or meaning. People navigating a major life transition: a career change, a relationship ending, midlife, grief, a loss of direction.
People who notice recurring patterns in relationships or emotional reactions and want to understand where they come from. People who are creative, reflective, drawn to the inner life…and want a therapist who can meet them there. And people who have experienced trauma and want to heal it in a way that feels integrated, not just managed.
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Do you have to talk about your childhood?
Not necessarily. And certainly not right away. We go at your pace. Early experiences often become relevant over time, not because we're excavating the past for its own sake, but because the past lives in the present in ways that can be both limiting and illuminating. What we haven't fully processed continues to shape us, often beneath our conscious awareness.
How long does depth therapy take?
Depth and psychodynamic work is generally longer-term than brief or solution-focused therapy because real transformation takes time. That said, many clients notice meaningful shifts within the first few months. We check in regularly about how things are progressing and what feels right for you.
What if you also need practical tools, not just insight?
Depth work and practical tools aren't opposites. They complement each other. When needed, I bring in CBT techniques, EMDR, or somatic practices to address what's happening right now, while the deeper psychodynamic exploration continues underneath. You don't have to choose between the two.
EMDR works better alongside talk therapy.
EMDR + Depth Therapy
If you're considering therapy, you've probably encountered a bewildering alphabet soup of approaches: CBT, DBT, ACT, EMDR, and more.
I want to talk about two of them. The ones I use most in my practice and why, when combined, research shows they're remarkably effective.
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Unlike therapies that focus primarily on managing symptoms, psychodynamic therapy explores the deeper roots of your struggles. We look at patterns that may have started in childhood, unconscious beliefs that shape your relationships, the ways past experiences continue to influence your present.
Research consistently shows that depth therapy creates lasting change. Not just symptom relief but fundamental shifts in how you understand yourself and relate to others.
And here's something I find genuinely profound about this: studies have found that the benefits of psychodynamic therapy actually increase over time, even after treatment ends. Which makes sense. When you understand the underlying patterns driving your pain, you develop the capacity to navigate future challenges on your own. The work doesn't stop when the sessions do.
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EMDR is one of the most researched trauma treatments available.
Originally developed for PTSD, it uses bilateral stimulation, typically guided eye movements, to help your brain reprocess traumatic memories that have gotten stuck. The World Health Organization and the American Psychological Association both recognize it as a first-line treatment for trauma. Many clients experience significant relief in fewer sessions than traditional talk therapy alone.
What makes it remarkable is both its effectiveness and its efficiency. Some things that would take years to move through in talk therapy alone can shift in a matter of sessions with EMDR. Not because the work is shortcuts but because it reaches the nervous system in a way that talking about something sometimes can't.
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Here's where it gets interesting: depth therapy and EMDR aren't competing approaches. They're complementary in a way that I don't think gets talked about enough.
Depth therapy helps us identify which memories and beliefs need attention. It helps us understand their significance in your life story, make meaning of your experiences, see the through-lines connecting past to present. EMDR then gives us a way to process the emotional charge of those traumatic memories. The ones that talk therapy alone might take much longer to reach.
If I had to put it simply: depth therapy gives us the map. It shows us where we need to go and why. EMDR gives us a way to actually get there.
Together they address both the cognitive understanding and the somatic, emotional processing that deep healing requires. Because real healing isn't just insight. It's something that has to happen in the body too.
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When I work with clients using both approaches, we're able to move between insight and processing, between understanding and healing. Some sessions are about exploring patterns and making connections. Others use EMDR to process specific memories that surface in the depth work. The two inform each other.
I've learnt that the clients who experience the most meaningful change aren't just the ones who feel better. They're the ones who understand themselves more deeply. Who don't just manage their symptoms but transform their relationship with themselves and with the people they love.
If you're considering therapy, you don't have to choose between understanding your past and healing from it. That's a false choice. And in my experience, the most powerful work happens when both are happening at the same time.
most couples don’t realize they have the same argument over and over again.
Most of us never learned the basics of relationships. There were no classes on how to express feelings, how to fight constructively, how to stay close to someone over time. We might work hard on our careers and put almost no effort into the relationships that matter most to us.
And then we wonder why they're so hard.
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When relationship problems become the main source of stress in someone's life, couples therapy often makes more sense than individual therapy.
The difference is significant. In individual therapy, we explore your inner world and unconscious patterns. In couples therapy, the relationship itself becomes the focus. We work on how you communicate, how you handle disagreements, how you show up for each other when things get hard.
A lot of my work involves teaching practical skills. I help couples learn to really listen to each other, develop empathy, find ways to calm down heated arguments before they spiral. I often encourage partners to talk directly to each other during sessions, not just to me. Because that's where the real material lives: in the actual dynamic happening between them, in real time, in the room where I can see it and step in when needed.
I get to watch the subtle shifts in their conversation. Where they get stuck. How fights start small and then suddenly aren't about what they started about at all.
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As a psychodynamic therapist, I also believe it's important to understand each person's history and how those histories collide in the relationship.
When two people fall in love and build a life together, it's never random. Each person brings patterns learned way back in childhood. Patterns absorbed from watching their parents' marriage, from their own early experiences of being loved or not loved, from what they learnt (consciously or not) about what relationships are supposed to feel like.
And then two people with two completely different sets of those patterns try to build something together.
We often replay in our current relationships what we experienced growing up. These patterns keep showing up, relationship after relationship, throughout our lives. When we can spot them and understand where they come from, we can start to change them.
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Here's where it gets interesting.
When we understand what triggers each person and how those triggers connect to earlier experiences, something shifts. Each partner develops a deeper understanding of the other. They become more aware of how their own behavior affects their partner. And that awareness opens the door to something that wasn't possible before: real emotional closeness.
Because most couples aren't fighting about what they think they're fighting about. They're re-enacting something much older. And the moment they can see that, even a little bit, the fight starts to look different.
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These patterns get passed down through families until someone decides to work on them.
Think about how complex this gets: each person brings patterns that trace back not just to their own childhood but to their parents' and grandparents' relationships too. A husband might do something that triggers his wife in the same way her father triggered her mother. The wife might react in ways that remind the husband of his own family dynamics. Usually these patterns aren't obvious at first. But over time, with attention and care, they become clearer. And workable.
The goal isn't just to fight less. It's for both partners to experience a deeper, more satisfying relationship than either of them has known before. To break free from cycles that may have been running in their families for generations.
That's not a small thing. And in my experience, it's entirely possible.
your dreams are trying to tell you something.
You wake up from a vivid dream. Maybe unsettling, maybe strange, maybe oddly moving. And within minutes it's gone. You shake it off, make your coffee, and get on with your day.
But what if that dream was trying to tell you something?
Not in a mystical, fortune-telling way. In a deeply psychological one.
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In depth psychology, particularly in the tradition of Carl Jung, dreams aren't random noise generated by a sleeping brain. They're communications from the unconscious: the vast, largely hidden part of the psyche that stores our memories, emotions, conflicts, and unlived potential.
During the day, we manage. We edit ourselves, stay functional, keep things moving. But at night, when the conscious mind relaxes its grip, something else gets to speak. Dreams are often that voice.
Jung believed that dreams don't try to deceive us. They try to compensate for what we're missing or avoiding in waking life. If you're pushing down grief, your dreams might keep returning to loss. If you're ignoring an important decision, a dream might present it in symbolic form. If a part of you is trying to emerge, a creative impulse, a truth you've been avoiding, a feeling you haven't let yourself have…it often finds its way into dreams first.
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One of the most common misconceptions about dream work is that dreams are either completely meaningless or literally predictive. Neither is true.
Dreams speak in the language of symbol and metaphor. The same language poetry uses, the same language that shows up in myth and fairy tale across every culture in human history. A house in a dream often represents the self. Water often represents the unconscious or emotion. Being chased might represent something you're avoiding rather than a literal threat.
But dream symbols aren't universal in a rigid way. What a snake means in your dream depends on your personal associations, your history, your cultural background, and what's happening in your life right now. This is why dream dictionaries are limited. The meaning lives in you, not in a lookup table.
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Working with dreams in therapy isn't about me interpreting your dream for you. It's a collaborative exploration. Following the images, associations, and feelings that a dream evokes to discover what it might be pointing toward in your inner life.
We might sit with a particular image and ask: what does this remind you of? What feeling does it carry? Where else in your life do you encounter this feeling? Sometimes a single dream image, explored carefully, opens up something that months of direct conversation hadn't quite reached.
It's not always dramatic. Sometimes a dream simply reflects what you already know but haven't quite let yourself say out loud. Sometimes it surfaces something genuinely surprising: a conflict you didn't realize was there, a grief you thought you'd resolved, a desire you'd been quietly dismissing.
Dream work also integrates naturally with other approaches. Somatic work can help you notice where a dream's emotion lives in the body. EMDR can sometimes be used to process imagery or feelings that surface through dreams, particularly when trauma is involved.
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A question I hear often: what if I don't remember my dreams?
You don't need to. Dream work is one thread in depth therapy, not a requirement. Many clients do rich, transformative work without ever bringing a dream into the room.
That said, if you want to start remembering more: keep a notebook by your bed and write down whatever you recall the moment you wake up. Even fragments, even just a feeling or a color. Don't judge it or try to make sense of it yet. Just capture it. The act of paying attention often increases recall over time.
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Here's the deeper point: whether or not we ever work directly with your dreams, depth therapy operates on the same principle that makes dream work valuable.
The belief that there is more going on inside you than what's visible on the surface.
The anxiety that won't go away. The relationship pattern that keeps repeating. The feeling that something important is missing, even when life looks fine from the outside. These are the waking equivalents of a dream that's trying to get your attention.
Depth therapy is, in a sense, the practice of learning to listen. To what's beneath the managed surface of daily life. To what the psyche has been trying to say.