✔ Individual Therapy
Individuals often arrive at therapy wanting to be fixed and improved. Messages about what is “healthy”, “normal”, or “problematic” appear in every segment of our society, and influence how we perceive every aspect of living. In addition to being assessed and diagnosed by doctors, we now assess and diagnose each other. Michel Foucault called “modern power,” a mechanism by which members of a society internalize social systems of control and thereby can practice policing themselves and maintain order in a society. Therapeutic conversations can be a place where individuals are given the space to examine cultural taken for granted ideas with open-mindedness, curiosity, and imagination. Through therapy, I’ve witnessed people finding experiences of agency in the face of ordinary and extraordinary dilemmas and predicaments.
✔ Relationship & Couples Therapy
Working in the field for nearly a decade, I’ve found that unexamined ideas about relationship roles and expectations can be eroding of connection and intimacy. We learn about love through idealized images and stories that lay the foundation for how we measure ourselves and our partners. The reality is that most of us don’t fit into the happily ever after story, and that trying to only increases pressure and contributes to a sense of personal and relational failure. The good news is that it is possible to examine how normativity lurks its way into our relationships, and to weigh the gains and costs of living by its rules. I have seen couples reinvigorate their connections against all odds, and together take up meaningful purposes and directions for their relationships.
✔ Family Therapy
Generational and cultural differences are only a few that are challenging of connections within families. The divisions that we see in the political and social climate of our time can locate themselves inside families and cause fissures and estrangement. The daily news cycle doesn’t promote dialogue or encourage listening to varying points of view and family members may struggle talking to each other while getting trapped in cycles of blame, disagreement, and what can seem like intractable conflict. Therapy can provide a space for slowed down, non-blaming conversations that honor the identities and embodied expressions of each family member, making room for new understanding, connection, and possibilities for moving forward.
✔ Anxiety & Depression & Overwhelm
We are living in an overly assessed and diagnosed culture that focuses on individual well being while churning out conditions that are far from honoring of our humanity. Mental health services have become a tool for increasing compliance to systems that are disparaging, oppressive, supremacist, and marginalizing. Coping skills teach us to “self regulate” and “manage” ourselves in order to function optimally in systems that rely on our performance to maintain production and output. Is it any wonder that we are blue, over capacity, numb, and disconnected? Exceptionalism is the basis of self- help culture. We are told that “we can do anything”, and shown examples of those who have. There is no place for an ordinary life, for stories of small acts of kindness or subtle resistances to injustices. How can we not feel let down and lonely in a world that makes little effort to care for its communities? Navigating and sorting through our feelings in a culture that benefits from our numbness can be so overwhelming and alienating. We need to know that we aren’t alone, and we need compassion and kindness every step of the way. Therapy can be a place where people can begin to untangle from the conditions in which anxiety, depression, overwhelm and other problems thrive. By separating people from their problems, clarity and agency can emerge and help us make meaningful change.
✔ A path less traveled: Creativity, Identity, Gender, Love, Sex
I have worked with architects, playwrights, directors, poets, musicians, producers, and executives in the entertainment industry. I have worked with queer, trans, non-binary, kinky, non-monogamous, highly sensitive, anti-capitalist activists and healers. All these require contending with the status quo and sometimes making costly but hopefully worthy choices. Instead of trying to fit individuals into narrow categories, I facilitate conversations that are welcoming of complexity, and nuance. I believe that monolithic definitions are disparaging of the differences needed for people to lead meaningful lives that can include inspiration not just compliance.
213.260.1656 estelleraskin@gmail.com