About Seed Therapy
Welcome to your transformation.
Life just isn’t working for you right now.
Everything seems like a struggle… work, family, social obligations.
You have no more bandwidth left. You snapped at a colleague following up on an assignment, feel guilty at your child’s soccer game because you haven’t exercised in months, and your relationship with your partner is crumbling with neglect.
It is exhausting to think about fixing anything. What more can you add when you have so little left?
But you know there is a better way, a better you: a respected employee, fulfilled parent, loving partner. A kernel, a seed, waiting to grow.
The first step in your journey to being your best self began with a single click. You’re here. You’ve already begun.
I know that this isn’t an easy decision for you.
Because it’s not easy for any of us. Many forces act against us whenever we decide to make changes in our lives, especially when we realize that therapy’s a good way to do it. Here’s what makes it so hard:
We don’t want to be a person who has needs.
We don’t want to be vulnerable.
We don’t want to ask for help.
We don’t want to acknowledge the pain we have felt… or the pain we have caused others.
We don’t want to do hard things.
Is there anything harder than therapy… where we are asked to do all of the above?? Where do we consider our needs? Choose to be vulnerable? Learn how to ask for help? Do the hard things?
As you can imagine, one-size-fits-all therapy doesn’t work.
Maybe you’ve been to therapy before and abandoned it.
Maybe you’ve even tried multiple therapists. You’ve tried the exercises they all want you to do, meditation recordings, distraction techniques, and none of them worked.
What’s the point of going to therapy if you’re always going to hear the same thing?
I’ll tell you something else that doesn’t work…
Here it is: A stack of unfinished, mystifying homework assignments that seem to have nothing to do with you and only increase the work on your plate.
You didn’t have time to write down a pros-cons list for every problem or each moment you rolled your eyes at your partner. You tried to journal, but it felt like a fifth-grade writing assignment. During mindfulness, you find yourself making shopping lists.
Sometimes, the list of things you should be doing in the name of self-improvement is just one more thing you feel like you’ve failed that day.
Therapy should be collaborative, grounded in your strengths and motivation.
At Seed Therapy, we give you personalized, collaborative therapy and a toolkit to change your life.
In your first session, we’ll complete an in-depth 60-minute assessment that will include biographical, psychological, and social information for a personal diagnosis and treatment plan.
In each session that follows, we will use your strengths, favorite media, hobbies, and other activities that fill you with joy to ground our work. If you’re down with deep breathing exercises, then we’ll dive in with that! However, our clients have also used baking (one baked so much, she began regularly donating the baked goods to a children’s charity!), painting, poetry, hiking, and kickboxing. One of our clients wrote and recorded rap music to bring to session, but we won’t hold you to that standard! Using and understanding strengths in therapy is key to making progress and finding peace.
We’ll ask you to bring in your favorite movies, books, and songs, and we’ll connect them to help you find what’s meaningful and beautiful in your life. Here’s the thing: we view the world with a particular lens. When we feel something with media, it tells us more about ourselves than we think.
Together, we’ll create a therapy partnership relevant to you, with a self-improvement plan that includes your vision, goals, and personality.
Once when we have established rapport, we will work to explore your patterns and unhelpful behaviors. We’ll examine the close – and not so close – relationships in your life to establish patterns and carefully mind-map to explore the why.
We’ll be on the lookout for the cognitive distortions (what we call: funhouse mirrors) that block our progress and work on new, true narratives to replace the faulty ones that keep you back.
Each session is individually tailored to your needs, goals, and experiences, and we offer you a variety of tools to help you reach your potential:
We’ll get your thoughts out of your head and onto paper with a series of scientifically proven techniques specially geared toward maximizing relationships and communication.
We’ll use graciousness and manners to improve symptoms of depression (it works!).
We’ll work on repairing seemingly broken relationships with writing and empathy exercises to understand the root of the problem and the likely solution
…and so much more!
About Me
My road to becoming a therapist was an unusual one.
I’ll give you a hint: I started out as a lawyer!
In 2009, when the economy was entering the Great Recession, I was in-house counsel at the world’s largest talent agency in Beverly Hills, California. After a merger, I was tasked with laying off dozens of senior talent agents, who would then have to enter a cratering job market while the housing bubble collapsed around them.
As part of my job, I had to call the employees who received severance once a month to “check-in.” As you can imagine, not everyone was happy to speak with me, but all did – some through tears, some in anger, some relatively unscathed.
One of these calls changed my life.
This ex-employee, at first very angry with me, began to cry. She spoke at length about caring for her mother (who was dying of cancer), her fear of losing her own health insurance, and her feelings of hopelessness as she applied for the few jobs amongst hundreds of hungry colleagues who were doing the same.
I listened for an hour, amazed at her resilience and her vulnerability, understanding the great privilege it was to be taken into her confidence. At the end of the call, she thanked me. Me! The person who had laid her off – the one who had put her in this position… she thanked ME. I realized at that moment how important it is to feel heard.
I’ve reflected on my job as in-house counsel, considering how often employees came to my office looking for advice and the conversations that followed. I realized that only with their trust and partnership, I experienced any success in my job.
I also understood how fulfilled I felt in the role of listener, confidante, and coach… and decided to make it my life’s work.
I believe people want to love if you just give them permission to do it.
I’ve seen it happen so many times.
A man who left his family to pursue a job and didn’t speak to his children for 22 years reconnected to his family with this philosophy. He said, “My children will never speak to me again.” Retired, he lived by himself and spent days replaying the story of his life over and over in his head, the mistakes he’d made. His sadness was complete.
Together, we began to write a letter to each child, taking responsibility, ensuring each child knew the leaving wasn’t their fault or because of them. In writing the letter repeatedly, we examined why he really left, going deep into his family history, motivations, fears, and beliefs. We drafted and redrafted, including what was helpful, discarding what wasn’t.
One day, he sent the letter. Silence followed – for weeks. Then, on Father’s Day, his son wrote back. The door opened a crack.
A man went to prison for 30 years when his daughter was a baby. After months of searching, he found her, and she agreed to meet. We worked on the purpose of this meeting, using empathy, role-playing, psychodynamics. It was touch and go, at first. It took work. And yet, I still receive photos of their holidays together because love is that powerful.
A woman who lost connection with her best friend following years of moves, life changes, jobs, and babies was convinced her friend would never speak to her again because of all the important events she had missed, the times she felt she was “young, wrapped up in my own life.” We worked on it. She reached out. Her friend was overjoyed to reconnect.
People want to love. They want to connect. I have seen this time and time again. We are social beings, made to understand our world with one another. Apologies go a long way. So do moments of gratitude or asking about someone’s day. Acknowledgment, noticing, asking questions all help us do what we really want to do: connect. I believe this strongly because I’ve seen it. I bring this belief to my practice every day.
Some of my education and experience…
After graduating from Pepperdine University School of Law, I became In-house counsel for William Morris Endeavor, shepherding the agency through one of the most landmark mergers in entertainment history. Through this experience, as I shared with you, I learned the importance of leveraging strengths, creating partnerships, and recognizing opportunities.
I then graduated with honors from the University of Southern California. I was awarded a competitive scholarship from the California Department of Mental Health to work with underserved, severely mentally ill populations. In this role, I gained a three-dimensional view of the human condition, the environment that shapes us, and the unique talents that each of us possesses – no matter our circumstances.
Over the past 16 years, I’ve sharpened my skills as an attorney and a therapist, creating fulfilling partnerships with clients – partnerships that respect their needs, environment, supports, and resources.
When I’m not doing therapy…
I make Marcella Hazan’s bolognese, run in the Metroparks, read long, cozy books, and try to find the off-the-beaten-path activities for my family in my new adopted home of Cleveland, Ohio.
I tend to make close friends with my servers and get the backstory of any Lyft driver. It’s my greatest joy.
Consider us your partner in healing…
Most people will spend thousands of dollars on possessions and events to sublimate that nagging feeling that something isn’t right, never getting to the root of the problem. And they end up in the same place each evening: wondering what would happen if life were just suddenly different.
Let’s join together to create the life you want.
Let’s start today. I look forward to meeting you. Give me a call, and let’s schedule your free consultation: (310) 717-4239.