SERVICES        

Dr. Gerstenzang’s Psychotherapy Services
Bringing Your Life Into Beautiful Balance

Populations served:

Range of treatment:

• Trauma recovery
• Anxiety and depression treatment
• Stress and anxiety management
• Improve communication

• Conflict resolution
• Parenting effectiveness
• Habit control
• Attaining laughter and joy

• You will learn to recognize, express and understand your emotions.
• You will become more aware of emotions of those around you.
• You will master use of emotions and thoughts in win-win ways.
• You will appreciate that all emotions and thoughts are useful and desirable.
• You will understand that being stuck in any emotional state—even happiness—is bad.
• Your new mastery of emotions and thoughts will enrich all your relationships.

• Hate and anger are signals and opportunities for clearing out problematic areas in your life.
• Confusion and happiness allow you to simultaneously to work on a problem and go ahead and enjoy all that’s right despite the problem.
• “Negative” and “positive” emotions do not denote value: they only denote relative potential for win-win (“positive” emotions are easier to use win-win).

For more details click links below or oval links on side

• You express thoughts and FEELINGS (basic psychology), both yours and those you perceive in others (family therapy).
• Together, we identify unexpressed thoughts and FEELINGS (psychodynamic).
• Thoughts are evaluated for their realism (cognitive behavioral therapy) and for their symbolism (psychodynamic).
• Clients are taught how to physically express their EMOTIONS and FEELINGS (bioenergetics, play therapy, gestalt therapy, psychodrama, family therapy).

• Clients are taught the FEELINGS and EMOTIONS associated with physical SENSATIONS (Dr. Sharon’s Unified Theory of Emotions).
• Clients are taught to control their MOODS by alternating between thoughts and feelings and acting out physical sensations (bioenergetics, gestalt therapy).
• “Melodrama”—playful expression of FEELINGS and EMOTIONS in more exaggerated ways than we ordinarily use—is encouraged in order to accelerate change, and make EMOTIONS less threatening, easier to identify, and easier to benefit from (play therapy, psychodrama).
• Clients are taught that stuck in emotional patterns can be cleared through connection to early manifestations and ‘reparenting’ of the pattern (psychoanalysis, hypnotherapy).
• Clients are taught that no matter what physical dysfunction they are experiencing, there is always a significant emotional component (psychoanalysis, bioenergetics, gestalt therapy).

For example:

People often predict doom and gloom to themselves by saying, “I know it’s going to be a bad day,” or to a child by saying, “You’re going to fall!.” But these are actually fear statements, not predictions. Statements driven by fear are meant to wake you up to possibilities and energize you for corrective action, but cannot predict anything with certainty. Treating fear-based statements as predictions will cause you to experience the depression, more fears, and angers associated with such an experience actually coming true.

At the same time, it’s also important not to dispatch any thought without some inspection. Fearful thoughts will continue to assail until you use your fear by getting accurately in touch with both the physics and purpose of your fear.  

To handle your fear well and gain maximum information from it, you need two tools.

1. Rephrase your statements to more accurately reflect your reality. You might need to say, “I’m afraid I’m going to have a bad day” and then articulate why you’re afraid. Or, to the child, you’d be more helpful to say “I’m afraid you’re going to fall down” and then explain why you’re afraid.
2. It will often help to physically express the fear by some kind of widening of your eyes and/or shivering (see Theory) so that you can get the entire message of your fear across to yourself, or the child, rather than cutting the ‘conversation’ short in terms of what your body is trying to tell you. Accurate physical expression also helps to detour you away from inaccurate and unhealthy thinking.