People often have a negative perception about their psychological symptoms and
therefore come into psychotherapy with the intention of alleviating symptoms.
While patients do find psychotherapy helpful in alleviating symptoms, the
transformational work comes from understanding what the symptoms are
attempting to communicate to you. Symptoms inform a person about the unmet
desires and unexpressed emotions of an authentic soul who yearns to emerge and
maximize its fullest potential. For instance, depression often communicates a
bottling-up of anger that aches to be expressed; anxiety often communicates a fear
of abandonment or harm. The soul uses symptoms to communicate the
need to be heard—When we listen to the soul, we can hear its need to
express and incorporate the true emotions that lie beneath the surface. Therefore,
allowing unexpressed emotions to surface results in the alleviation of symptoms
(because the soul no longer needs to communicate through symptoms),
which enables the emergence of a soul no longer buried beneath the
symptoms.

We have compassion for people who fear being overwhelmed by their true emotions.
People often spend their whole life trying to protect themselves against this fear by
developing, either consciously or unconsciously, strong defense mechanisms that
quarantine their true emotions. For instance, people use such defense mechanism as
blaming their problems on others, continually defensive in conversations, always
acting as if everything is okay, overly complementary to people they despise, or
becoming a workaholic or engaging in other addictive behaviors. Defenses help
avoid true feelings of sadness, pain, abandonment, and loss but they result in
repetitive behaviors that keep people stuck.

Defense mechanisms are not solely bad—we developed defense mechanisms early
in life to protect us against emotions we weren’t equipped to handle. However, after
a while it becomes tiring and painful to spend your life suppressing emotions out of
fear they will overwhelm you. For instance, sometimes defending against true
emotions might result in the appearance of physiological symptoms like high blood
pressure and heart disease for men and fibromyalgia for women. The energy to
uphold defenses ends up becoming more tiring, painful, and limiting than
uncovering the true emotions they feared all along. People often find in
psychotherapy that allowing their true emotions to surface is not as scary as they
thought. Expressing true emotions frees people from the chains of defenses to allow
the experience of mourning loss and abandonment, healing wounds, and moving
forward in life. Ultimately, We work with individuals and couples to maximize their
potential by understanding how symptoms can inform one’s path towards self-
discovery and personal transformation.