Depth-Oriented Individual Psychotherapy

Online Therapy for High-Functioning Adults in CA, NY & TX

 

I work with thoughtful, high functioning adults who appear capable on the outside and feel alone, stuck, or quietly overwhelmed on the inside.

I’m not crazy about the phrase “high functioning,” but I think you know what I mean. You’re doing well by most measures.

The people who know you would be surprised to hear that anything is wrong, and keeping it that way takes something out of you that nobody sees. That’s usually what makes it so hard to say out loud.

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I commonly work with adults navigating:
 

• Persistent self-doubt and shame

• Anxiety masked by high achievement

• Depression that feels invisible to others

• Complex relationship patterns

• Anger that feels disproportionate or confusing

• Parenting struggles rooted in unresolved family dynamics

• A sense of isolation despite outward success

 

What people usually bring in

 

Sometimes there’s a clear reason. More often there isn’t one, and that’s its own kind of frustrating, because it’s much easier to justify getting help for something that has a name. Not having a name for it doesn’t mean there’s nothing there.

 

So people arrive with things like persistent self doubt, or a sense of shame that doesn’t seem to attach itself to anything in particular. Anxiety sitting underneath achievement, where nobody can see it, including sometimes you. Depression that’s completely invisible to everyone around you. Relationships that keep following the same patterns, even when you can see those patterns unfolding. Anger that feels out of proportion to whatever set it off, and confusing for that reason. Parenting that keeps running into something from your own family that you were fairly sure you’d left behind. And a real sense of isolation, in a life that from the outside looks quite full.
 

You don’t need to arrive with any of it organized. Often people can’t say what’s actually wrong when they start. Working that out is part of our work.

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What depth oriented actually means

 

The terms “insight-driven” and “depth-oriented” get used a lot, so let me explain what I mean by them.
 

Many approaches focus on what you're doing and how you might do something differently. I'm interested in that too, but first I want to understand what's underneath the behavior and why it's there in the first place.

One of the things I often tell my clients is to replace the judgment hat with the curiosity hat. The judgment hat is cheap.  It’s easy to decide that something is good or bad, write it off and move on. The curiosity hat is harder, or at the very least it’s slower, because it asks why. But that’s where all the information is.
 

There’s a story I think about often. A man is on the train with his children, and the children are loud and running around and bothering everybody in the car, and he’s just sitting there, not saying a word. Everyone around him is irritated, and honestly, who wouldn’t be. Then you find out he’s on his way back from the hospital, where he has just said goodbye to his wife, and those children have just lost their mother. Nothing about the behavior changed. Everything about your response to it did.
 

A great deal of what I do is that. Finding the context that makes a behavior make sense, including your own behavior, and particularly the parts of it you’ve already judged and put away. And often, those are the parts of yourself you’ve judged most harshly
 

So rather than focusing only on behaviors, we get curious about what’s underneath them, because behavior is the visible manifestation of something deeper. And we look at patterns rather than incidents, because one incident on its own will tell you very little, and the pattern will tell you so much more..

 

This is not quick

 

I’d rather be straightforward about that now than have you find out three months in. It isn’t quick fix therapy. It’s careful, sustained work, and it’s meant to leave you feeling more internally solid and less driven by old dynamics.
 

That takes a while. Patterns that developed over decades tend not to come apart in six sessions. That isn’t a matter of effort on your part. It’s just how this works.

What the work is actually like
 

I am a calming force with an unrelenting ‘yes-you-can’ attitude.  I balance deep empathy, strong analytic skills and a bit of dry humor to empower you to better understand yourself.  I hold a deep belief in your capacity to create a life that feels more fully your own. Therapy is the process of trading in the life you have, for the life you want.  
 

I’m not going to hurry you past what you’re feeling or rush to solve it before we understand it. One of my favorite expressions is that we owe people the dignity of their suffering, and I mean it.
 

I’m also not going to sit quietly and nod at you for fifty minutes. I’ll tell you what I’m noticing, including the uncomfortable parts, because I’d rather be useful to you than comfortable myself.

 

What tends to change

 

I want to be careful about promising outcomes, so let me say this the way I’d say it in the room.
 

Generally, over time, people feel more internally solid, and old dynamics begin to have less power over them. Relationships start to look less like a rerun. The persistent questioning of whether you’re doing well enough starts to quiet. Decisions become easier because you have a stronger sense of what you actually want, rather than being guided by how your choices might be perceived by others.
 

None of that arrives all at once, and none of it arrives on a schedule.

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About me

 

My name is Gila Brown. I’m a licensed marriage and family therapist, licensed in California, New York and Texas, and I see adults online in all three states.
 

Much of my practice focuses on the complex relational dynamics that can develop in narcissistic families and relationships. But much of this work is also simply sitting with someone thoughtful who can't quite work out why their life feels the way it does, and taking the time to find out.
 

If what you’re reading here connects to a parent, or to a relationship you’re coming out of, I’ve written about both of those in more detail: therapy for adult children of narcissistic parents, and recovery from a narcissistic partner relationship.
 

If this sounds like you, I’d be glad to hear from you. You don’t need to have it figured out before you write.

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