Somebody Sit in My Chair

This year I went through the process of incorporating my private practice in Washington, D.C. Doing so required getting really clear about my approach to therapy and landing on a name. Being Alive, a nod to the show-stopper from Stephen Sondheim’s Company felt like the perfect choice. Sure, as a name it’s a little vague for a therapy practice. But it evokes so much about how I approach my work that I had to choose it!

If you’re unfamiliar with the Broadway musical Company, it’s a show about an unpartnered person witnessing their married friends’ complex relationships and wondering why anyone would subject themselves to such a miserable thing like marriage. The protagonist’s journey consists of scene after scene of bearing witness to the couples’ conflict, mind games, resentments, and joys. Finally, something clicks and “Being Alive” is the raw expression of an epiphany about the duality of marriage.

Somebody hold me too close
Somebody hurt me too deep
Somebody sit in my chair
And ruin my sleep
And make me aware
Of being alive, being alive

Somebody need me too much
Somebody know me too well
Somebody pull me up short
And put me through hell
And give me support
For being alive
Make me alive
Make me alive

"Being Alive," from Company (1970). Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.

To be alive, to be in relationship with others, is to experience both pleasure and pain.

I had a first career as a minister advocating for LGBTQ people in faith communities, and providing pastoral care to LGBTQ folks who fled religious and familial abuse. Experiencing and witnessing the harm many families and communities of faith have wrought is what sent me back to graduate school to become a psychotherapist. My work as a minister and advocate taught me to go toward pain and speak clearly about it. My training and work as a therapist has given me hope that pain can be healed when people cultivate the empowerment and courage to make decisions and take opportunities that provide the greatest opportunity for being truly alive.

As a couples therapist, I’m invited by my clients to witness their relationships. I join them in grieving their disappointments, celebrating their breakthroughs, and seeking out healthier patterns of communication and intimacy. “Being Alive” reminds me that my work isn’t about making relationships perfect. Relationships are always imperfect. Every relationship is a commitment to navigate the perpetual problems that particular combination of imperfect people brings about. My approach to couples therapy is to grow and deepen the relationship so that problems feel lighter, more manageable and malleable.

Over the last decade my approach to couples and individual psychotherapy has moved away from cognitive-behavioral approaches and toward humanistic-existential methods. Existential psychotherapy, which traces itself back to figures like Viktor Frankl, the holocaust survivor famous for Man’s Search for Meaning, focuses on the choice, agency, and meaning available to any individual, even in the most horrific circumstances.

If that feels kind of lofty and/or intense, let’s use “Being Alive” as a more accessible explainer. What does it mean for me to be in the relationship? To be monogamous or not? Or to be single? How do these choices change how I think about myself and what I imagine is possible? What does it mean to be me in the here and now? With problems, symptoms, challenges that I can’t fully shake? How can I still thrive?

I know that finding a therapist to hold space for questions like these can feel like an incredibly daunting and opaque process. Through writing I hope to give colleagues and (potential) clients a glimpse at how I work. If you’re interested in working together, please be in touch.