Greg Hertz

My Approach to Helping

I practice psychoanalytic/psychodynamic psychotherapy, working in-depth over time with careful attention to fundamental growth processes. Recurrent emotional pain is calling for us to reconnect to our true self. It is very uncomfortable to be with all of our experience, yet avoiding feeling cuts us off from meaning and movement that we need to meet suffering with grace and growth. Our defenses against the fullness of our felt experience originate in adaptive strategies to preserve connection in early relationships. Certain feelings were unsafe for us to express and we learned to hide these parts from others and even from ourselves. The psychotherapy relationship helps us question these habitual limited ways of being and find more freedom, satisfaction, and peace.

My Approach to Helping

The safety and stability of this space supports us to turn towards difficult experience with presence and curiosity. Together, we attend to the hidden by listening to intuitive ways of knowing such as feelings, associations, fantasies, dreams, and the body. In a relationship of deep acceptance and attunement, we shine light on what is happening in us at a fundamental level and have new experiences of what is possible. Greater awareness of ourselves brings a sense of wholeness and ease, a freedom to be ourselves and to realize our potential. This work is joyous and liberating. It is also difficult, demanding courage and capacity to be with the uncomfortable and unknown. The right therapy relationship can help us be with ourselves in a new way, reconnecting us with our life.