Dynamic Psychotherapy

Sometimes, medication, advice or behavior therapy is not enough or is not desired. A psychodynamic understanding of one’s self, including unconscious motivation, discovered in a safe relationship with an experienced psychotherapist, provides a powerful tool for breaking damaging bad habits and getting your life back on track.

Medication

In the past 50 years, a variety of medicines have been discovered and developed that have vastly changed psychiatric/psychological treatment. Although not always effective, psychotropic medication has provided millions of people relief from life-crippling depression, anxiety, moodiness, phobias, and severe mental illness. I have been in practice during a good part of this period of discovery and have a unique perspective to guide my selection of proper and individualized medication for a wide variety of situations and people.

Stress Management and Biofeedback

Many esoteric methods such as Yoga, Transcendental Meditation, Ti Che, and simple prayer can be mastered and practiced daily to relieve stress. During my career running a psychophysiology research laboratory at UCLA, I learned many of these methods and distilled their essence into a secular method of self-regulation that I teach with the help of biofeedback and real-time monitoring of the body’s response. Weekly biofeedback assisted training sessions coupled with daily practice at home reduce the health damaging effects of stress and relieve symptoms such as headache, high blood pressure, irritable bowel syndrome, chronic pain, irregular heart beats (benign arrhythmia), hot flashes, or skin conditions within 4-8 weeks.

Virtual Reality Immersion Therapy for Phobias

This new tool for effectively helping people over come life-limiting phobias such as fear of flying, fear of public speaking, claustrophobia, driving phobia and acrophobia has been paired with biofeedback and self regulation training to make it possible to successfully reenter areas of life that have been excluded because of phobic anxiety and panic attacks. For more information, go to www.vrphobia.com.

Life Partner Communications Skill Training (Couples Therapy)

It is well known that in order to make a relationship work, “you have to work at it”, but often well intended people don’t know what to do to “work at it”. In couples therapy I help you and your partner to learn and change what is standing in your way to have a successful, on going, lively relationship that gets better and better with time.

Psychoanalysis

Considered by some to be old fashioned and ineffective, this intense, well studied treatment method enables a thorough understanding of one’s self by frank exploration of the therapeutic relationship as well as examining daily activities and dreams. Like a magician spoiling his trick by revealing his method to the audience, the mystery and power of self defeating behavior and thinking can be relieved and changed with self-knowledge and understanding acquired in psychoanalysis.