Nana Park, MA

The work I do is slower than some forms of therapy and asks more of you. We are not primarily looking for skills or techniques. We are looking at the patterns in your life and your relationships and trying to understand where they come from. The understanding is what allows the patterns to begin to shift.

I work psychoanalytically because I have found that for many of the clients I see, the surface symptom is only the visible part of something deeper. A relationship pattern that keeps repeating; a way of relating to authority that does not match what the client wants; a sense of self that has not quite become solid. Tools and skills can help, but for some clients, what is needed is a different kind of work.

Cultural context matters in this work. Who your family was, how they came to be where they are, what messages you absorbed about who you were supposed to be, what got celebrated and what got silenced. I hold all of that as part of the territory, not as a side topic.

With couples, the work tends to focus on what each of you brings to the relationship from your earlier life, how those things are interacting, and what each of you is asking the other to do for you that may not be theirs to do.