Welcome to my practice site.  Because it's so important that you click with your therapist, the first step ought to be seeing if you click with your therapist's ideas about what therapy can be.  I hope the following gives you a sense of how I think.

The most basic idea about depth psychotherapy is that it’s less about learning easily taught “techniques” or “tools” and more about your tolerance for sitting with what's inside you.  Beyond that, comfortable enough to work through whatever heavy or prickly feelings you want to be different.  Feeling comfortable develops naturally from feeling really listened to, from a feeling that your therapist is really trying to understand the complexity usually bundled into our problems.  Sometimes a “technique” or homework assignment is very helpful, but attempts at quick fixes often miss the mark due to lack of understanding.  It may be that you don’t know what to focus on at first, or that you can’t even bring yourself to name the problems out loud, or that you know but can’t seem to budge them.  Or you could be starting somewhere else.  In any of these situations, it’s important to expect that a therapist  -  whatever his or her style or perspective  - must begin by understanding how you view what keeps you stuck.  Overall, of course, our aim is to uncover sources of pain and limitation, so that you feel bolder in the world and more open to loving and being loved.

Theoretical Orientation may be important to you, or not even on the radar.  Research has shown that experienced therapists - irrespective of their theoretical leanings - tend to say very similar things and focus on similar issues.  Theories about how people work ground a therapist/therapy, because they provide different perspectives from which we can get begin to be curious about a specific problem.  It's also good to think about why different theories end up looking similar in the office:  regardless of theory, all psychotherapists are working on the same organ: the brain (or heart, or soul), which has its own rules.

That said, the theories that have been helpful to me in understanding our human complications include attachment theory, existential-humanistic therapies, the ever-broadening neuro-biological perspective, and psychoanalytic theories about  the one's sense of Self and experience of others.  These theories of mind ground my thinking, but what I actually do in the office is more influenced by the person I'm working with.  A cooking-show metaphor may be more clear:  if therapy is an omelet, I come to my office packing a quality omelet pan, eggs, and thousands of hours of practice at making omelets.  Your individuality supplies the ingredients that make the omelet specific to you.

Why a person seeks help is, of course, unique to her or him, but we most commonly feel stuck about something, which leads to feeling anxious, depressed, lonely, overwhelmed, or hopelessly locked into an unwanted behavior.  The problem is often embedded in ways of thinking or of being in relationship that make the problem seem unsolvable.  (An alternative is that we know what we have to do to change, but we "just need to make it happen").  My rule of thumb is that if smarts were enough to get un-stuck, we would all be unstuck already.  In the end, that's why people seek therapy, I think:  we come to get help from somebody outside our own heads or social circle.