Find a Therapist in Pacifica, California.

You will gain more self awareness and practical skills to manage your life better. Whatever your concern, it becomes a vehicle for you to understand and transform outdated thinking and ways of being that may no longer serve you . We will explore the opportunities inherent in your life's circumstances and look for ways for you to be happier, healthier, more confident, and connected. You will discover and learn about yourself, and develop new skills that will help you in all areas of your life.

I provide brief solutions-focused psychotherapy to help clients assess personal and professional functioning, clarify goals, and strengthen social and emotional skills. I specialize in brief online relationship counseling. Online counseling allows clients to seek help as needed, engage in therapy at a schedule that's convenient to them, and keep their counselor as they progress through life. I work with LGBTQ and hetero clients on individual, couple, and alternative relationship concerns. Clients explore issues that impact their professional and personal relationships, including communication, power dynamics, and intimacy. I accept US$ and cryptocurrencies.

I'm a licensed psychotherapist in San Francisco focused on helping young to middle aged professionals get the most from their personal and professional lives. If you're looking for a therapist, I imagine that on some level you are in distress. Our work can focus on solving immediate issues while undertaking the deeper process of addressing underlying causes so that unwanted patterns don't repeat.

My technique is based in psychodynamic relational-cultural psychotherapy. This means that I hold our relationship, the unconscious process between us, and your personal--experiences, identities, struggles, successes and strengths--in the context of your social-culutral-familiar locations in society. I pay close attention to your unconscious process (the part of your mind you are not aware of but that is affecting your emotions and behaviors) to better understand what your needing to express, feel and work through, in order for healing to take place inside of you and between us.   

Are you having trouble finding constructive ways to deal with problems or issues in your life? Are those problems or issues causing you a great deal of pain that persists for more than a few days? For most people, psychotherapy can be extremely helpful when one is grappling with a life, relationship or work issue, or a specific mental health concern. With over 26 years of experience, I offer a collaborative psychotherapy that is pragmatic, problem-solving and goal-oriented. If you have a strong desire to change and are willing to alter those aspects of your life that are no longer working for you, psychotherapy with a skilled and experienced psychotherapist will enhance your life.

Regardless of therapeutic technique, the most important part of psychotherapy is the relationship between client and therapist. Therapy is best when it is collaborative. In my work, I support, and sometimes challenge, you to dig deep, to examine what is working for you, and the ways you are not in alignment with your own vision of health. There are good reasons each of us has come to behave as we do. Even if some of our behaviors or beliefs no longer serve us, or even harm us, it is important that we understand how we came to use certain strategies in order to let them go and choose new ways of being in the world.

My approach is grounded in an existential-humanistic psychology tradition that is inspired by relational and psychodynamic therapeutic philosophies. What this essentially means is that I see my role as your therapist as one that tries to see you in a holistic way through dialogue so that you may better see yourself (your patterns, meaning behind your experience, etc.), and create the person that you want to become through a healthier mindset and future choices.

You don't need to do it all alone. And turns out, as more and more brain research is showing us, you're not meant to. Many of our original wounds, with echoes in our current lives, come from past and often early relationships. And while there are many valuable paths to healing, psychotherapy provides a special safe relationship in which these past experiences can be rewired and new aspects of yourself can be discovered or rediscovered. With compassionate reflection, encouragement, and challenge, transformation can happen!

I offer psychotherapy for people who have a specific issue they want to address or if there is no clear-cut understanding of the problem but life doesn't feel quite right. I collaborate with my clients to understand what they most would like their lives to feel like. Next, we identify the past and current experiences that may be interfering with living this kind of life. Most importantly we identify the constricting beliefs developed from these experiences and empower them to question these assumptions. Over time, they are able to adopt newer - more self-enhancing - beliefs about life and the world so that a satisfying and meaningful life becomes their reality.

Psychotherapy is a process of entering into a trusting, confidential relationship with a professionally trained therapist to explore your inner and outer conflicts, anxieties, relationship problems and traumas of all kinds, big and small. We all carry around inner voices and experiences from our childhood and youth, as well as from experiences in adulthood, which we are unaware of but have a big impact on our experience of self, other and Life itself. Psychotherapy is a safe place to sort it out and develop more sense of self-confidence, choice and strength. You should feel free to try different therapists and kind of therapy to see what feels right to you and trust your intuition.

For reasons that are not entirely clear, most people are helped by sitting down with someone who respects them and understands them, and devotes time to listening to them. I practice depth psychotherapy, but I often use very practical approached like cognitive-behavioral therapy, to help my clients get past life obstacles and moving forward in their lives.

Surprising as it may be, what happens to us does not determine our happiness so much as how we relate to what happens. Psychotherapy provides an environment and an opportunity to explore the ways you relate to your experience, and in so doing to help you have more fulfilling relationships with others, and a greater sense of meaning and understanding in your life. It also helps you make better choices and change unhelpful, limiting behaviors and relational patterns. Incorporating Buddhist mindfulness practice, as well as current understanding of how the brain processes information, I'm very engaged and collaborative in helping you achieve the goals you want to address in our work.

As a Psychotherapist who has practiced both in Belgium and California I have a keen understanding about how multi-cultural issues such as immigration, culture-shock and re-entry shock can affect a person or relationship. Since each person or relationship is Unique I make use of several therapeutic techniques. I have a wealth of experience helping people with a variety of issues either through the means of individual psychotherapy or couples counseling. Feel free to contact me with any questions you might have or check out my website at: HTTP://PhilippeNicolayMFT.com