No single approach works with everyone. Good therapy is as much art as science, and any advice or insights I have to offer can only succeed if they fit well within your present life.  I’m a big believer in supporting people where they are, so I spend a lot of time exploring your strengths, to see if we can use them to help you move forward. Change rarely involves a complete overhaul in how you live your life. Our most powerful moments of personal growth generally strike a healthy balance between accepting things as they are and striving to make them better.

You can probably also tell from glancing at my site that I place relationships front and center in my thinking. That’s because the research on psychological change and growth—including studies on self-esteem, depression, anxiety, loss, and a host of other concerns—have pointed again and again to the importance of the people around us, in either helping us move forward or holding us back. It isn’t enough to want to change; you also need an environment that supports your efforts, including people who can appreciate your attempts to grow. What I’ve learned through my training, research, and practice, is that the process of overcoming any number of problems often involves changes in how we interact.

I also believe in an unconscious mind; the evidence is overwhelming at this point that we often perform a range of behaviors without always knowing precisely why. If I think an unconscious habit is causing you trouble, I’ll help you use that insight to keep yourself moving forward.  The notion of an unconscious mind is currently embraced by just about every psychological perspective (people mainly disagree about what’s in it); in my case, I’m strongly influenced by a school of thought called relational psychoanalysis, which holds that many of our habits—helpful or unhelpful—stem from a healthy desire to feel like whole, genuine people while still maintaining intimacy with the people we care about.  This doesn’t mean the past determines us. If anything, these newer ideas about the unconscious place greater emphasis on how we maintain our problems through our present behavior.

Having said all this, I should add that I’m also heavily influenced by research on what works. If a technique is known to be particularly effective with anxiety, I’ll use it to help you. For that reason my approach is often called integrationist: I’ve been trained in a range of techniques and schools of thought, and in any given session I might be drawing on several in an attempt to help you. My clients are used to hearing me refer to one study or another in the course of our conversations. I love reading about what works, and I love sharing it. I think it makes me a better psychologist and a better writer.

~ Dr. Craig Malkin