ABOUT WORKING WITH AL
Note: After living and working in New York City for nearly a decade, I am now living in Vienna, Austria and providing exclusively online psychotherapy sessions. Maintaining my US credentials, I am happy to accept referrals for people living in New York, New Jersey, and select other areas in the US and Europe.
The creative arts (including music, sound, movement, drawing) offer amazing tools that can help you express what maybe has never been given a voice before, or felt too big, too complex, - or too shameful - to say in words. You can find sounds that match feelings - and hold them, and hold yourself there. By doing something as simple as playing a drum really loud, thumping on your own chest, vocalizing, or moving in a new way that embodies your experience, you’re embracing that which otherwise overwhelms you, and moving into it creatively.
From a creative place -- a place of “ok, well what does this sound need, what does this movement/image/etc need?” -- you’ll discover something about what you need. Like a composer or an improviser, makes their musical choices and an emotional outcome comes out, you’re going to do the same.
In this creative space our focus is to tell your story. When you listen to what's there, you hear your stories. They are the stories of your deep experience, beyond words. The creative tools help you to tell and listen to those stories and appreciate them as something with complexity, meaning and beauty that help inform you, help you to grieve, confront discomforts and find its place in your life. When you start to extract this story you can see and share it in a new way. When you embody it you become a character in your own story. A character that’s now free to be different than how you've previously been. Your story becomes a living and breathing experience rather than a stuck way of being.
And we’ll do it together. Because it’s not just about telling your story or understanding why you are the way you are, but also about coming out of the shame of isolation. Of sharing not just the facts of your life but the reality of your existence with another person. When you’re stuck inside yourself, unable to come out into the world in a new way, the first step is letting someone into your world. And when you can share your inner world with another person, without judgement or rejection, it begins to transform. Relationship wounds heal in relationships.
