“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the heck is water?’”¹

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Our lives are the water we all swim in – and when there’s a problem, we often can’t clearly see or name it because it’s so familiar. We accept our own patterns of thinking, behaving, and relating to others because we’ve never known a different way. Many of my clients come to therapy with a sense of bewilderment similar to the two young fish above. They possess incredible strengths and resources but feel unable to fix painful patterns in their lives. They wonder, “What’s wrong with me?” when in fact, there’s a complex combination of factors contributing to difficulties in functioning.

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Maybe you’ve been experiencing a sense of unease or find yourself reacting in ways that you can’t make sense of. Maybe you can’t stop thinking about something that happened in the past, or obsessing about something that might happen in the future. Maybe you’re having medical symptoms for which none of your doctors can find a cause, or you’re unable to sleep even though you’re exhausted. Maybe you just feel disconnected, like you’re on autopilot and “going through the motions” each day.

 

My job as your therapist is to help you step out of the “water” of your daily life and figure out what’s driving these difficulties. You can start to see where things you’ve accepted as “normal” may in fact be part of the problem, and you can learn how to make the changes necessary to live your best life. You can expect to do this work in a warm, welcoming environment full of humor and compassion when you enter into therapy with me.

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¹ Quotation taken from:
Wallace, D.F. (2005, May 21). This is Water [Speech transcript]. James Clear.
https://jamesclear.com/great-speeches/this-is-water-by-david-foster-wallace