Letter to New Clients
Dear Client,
Thank you for trusting me to guide you through the therapy process!
Your progress is of utmost importance to me. Your thoughts, feelings, worries, dreams, and fantasies are now my preoccupation. You are no longer holding those alone. I am committed to seeing you through this process, understanding what ails you, and blazing a path towards a better life for you. I ask that you too make that commitment to this process by showing up weekly for your sessions and if you are interested and find it helpful, engaging with an interactive journal between sessions.
This journal will act as a keepsake of the insights and findings of your therapy. We will collect images, inspirational quotes, and various coping tools for you to glance at when you’ve fallen back into your old habits, and can’t remember new ways of being in the world. You can work in the journal as much or as little as you want, but it is available to you as a way to extend the therapeutic space beyond the therapy room or Zoom portal.
If you glance through the journal it will give you some sense of the scope of therapy and the territory that we will cover. I’ve incorporated many tools here from the alphabet soup of therapies that exist: AEDP, DBT, CBT, IFS, ACT, EMDR. I’ve studied these and distilled what I believe are the curative factors in each.
As you’ll see, the first part of the journal begins with a collection of “inner resources”. Before we venture into the past and some really troubling moments, I like to make sure that you have access to a sense of inner safety. What does this mean? That means that when difficult feelings come up, you don’t get too overwhelmed. You can put those feelings away temporarily, and come back to a sense of being “okay” in the world. For some people that’s easy, for others that is quite difficult. But don’t worry, we will build that sense of safety together and it will take however long it takes.
Then, when you’re ready, we dive deep into processing some of the core memories that relate to your symptoms. The treatment modality EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) allows us to unlock the nervous system that stores the thoughts, feelings, and sensations of old wounds and it unleashes an innate healing capacity to process these past experiences. Consequently, our journey to past memories turns into an effective form of releasing old ways, and eventually finding new self-beliefs and patterns.
Through therapy, you might also meet and get to know different parts of self that operate internally, some that you’re familiar with, like you’re inner critic, or inner child, and some that will surprise you. You’ll get a sense of which feelings trip you up, and shouldn’t be indulged and which feelings need to be moved through in order to get a golden nugget of information from them. You’ll also understand how you show up in romantic relationships and friendships, and together we’ll consider whether you think your pattern is working for you.
At the same time that you are discovering all of the above information, we are also beginning to articulate and flesh out new ways of being! It’s not enough to have the insight into longstanding unhelpful patterns- it’s vital to begin to outline exactly which new patterns you’d like to try on: new beliefs about yourself, the world, others. For instance, maybe it’s time to learn how to set healthy boundaries or communicate effectively? Maybe you’ll be called to abandon an effortful way of getting ahead in the world for a more inspired and ease-full approach of getting in the flow? Maybe you’ll realize that procrastination was coming from a place of fear, and we’ll chart a course that calls on your inner courage to forge ahead? The possibilities are endless and individual to you.
I’m excited to see what you’ll discover and what you’ll create!
Warmly,
Dr. Anat