Therapy for Film, Television & Creative Professionals
Creative work asks unusual things of a person. A career can be intensely public and strangely isolating; collaborative and competitive; meaningful and absurd. Success may arrive unpredictably, disappear just as quickly, or fail to feel the way you imagined it would. Work, identity, relationships, money, ambition, envy, rejection, visibility, and self-worth can become difficult to separate from one another.
A significant part of my practice is with writers, directors, actors, producers, and others working in film, television, and the arts. People come to therapy for many of the ordinary reasons anyone does: relationships, anxiety, depression, sexuality, family, grief, questions about who they are and what they want. But creative and entertainment-industry lives can give those questions a particular shape, and it can be important to work without someone has experience understanding the particular joys and griefs of that world.
Therapy and Creative Work
People come to therapy for many different reasons, and I do not assume that working in a creative field explains the difficulty that brings someone in.
What matters is that creative work often becomes entangled with identity, ambition, relationships, money, visibility, disappointment, and the question of what one actually wants. Therapy can offer a place to think about those experiences without reducing them to productivity, performance, or career strategy.
My interest is less in prescribing what a creative life should look like than in understanding the particular conflicts, repetitions, attachments, and possibilities that belong to yours
A Psychodynamic Approach
Psychodynamic therapy is less concerned with giving advice than with understanding the patterns, conflicts, and relationships that shape a life over time.
For creative people, this can mean making room for questions that do not have immediate answers: what drives ambition, what makes certain forms of recognition matter so much, what happens around disappointment or success, how relationships become organized around work, and what may be difficult to know or admit about desire.
The aim is not to make you more productive or better adjusted to the demands of an industry. It is to create enough space to understand what is happening more deeply, and to allow different possibilities to emerge.
I work with adults throughout California by telehealth, with limited in-person availability in Ojai.