Thank you for reaching out to The-Other-Therapy! One of our representatives will get back to you shortly. We appreciate your interest and look forward to assisting you.
My Approach
There is a difference between feeling better and getting better. My work is oriented toward the second: understanding what generates the discomfort, not managing around it.
Getting Better,
Not Just Feeling Better
Feeling better means reducing discomfort temporarily. Getting better means understanding what generates that discomfort in the first place: the patterns you repeat, the feelings you avoid, the ways you get in your own way without realizing it.
I am interested in what is happening underneath the surface: emotional patterns operating outside your awareness, defenses you developed for good reason that now cost more than they protect, and the ways your closest relationships reveal what you have not yet been willing to face.
That can sound confronting. It's meant to. But it is also what works. Clients who come to me after years of surface-level therapy tend to say the same thing: this feels different. What they usually mean is that we are working on the root problem, not circling it.
This feels different from any therapy I've done before.— What clients tend to say after the first few sessions
Change Happens in Moments
There is a version of therapy where you arrive at one large insight and everything reorganizes around it. That is not usually how it goes. Insight matters, because you cannot change a pattern you cannot see. But seeing a pattern and doing something other than the pattern are two different events, and the second one happens in much smaller units than people expect.
Change happens in the heat of the moment. It is the second in which you feel the familiar pull to withdraw, or to explain yourself, or to go quiet and start managing the other person's mood, and you do the other thing instead. Every cell in your body will tell you not to. You do it anyway, and something becomes possible that was not possible a moment earlier.
A woman in a couples session was in the middle of feeling deeply unsure of herself. The familiar move would have been to go sideways: test her partner, fish for reassurance in a way he would experience as an ambush, and end up further from the thing she actually wanted. Instead she said it plainly: I'm feeling really anxious right now. Can you tell me that I'm good enough for you?
He said, you're more than enough for me. And she let it in, which is its own piece of work. Plenty of people manage to ask and then deflect the answer.
Nothing about that exchange was dramatic. It took about fifteen seconds. But it was the first time in that relationship she had asked for something without armor on, and it opened a door that a great deal of talking about the problem had not.
Moments like that are small enough to miss entirely. They are also the whole thing. Enough of them and the automatic pattern starts to lose its authority, not because you have talked yourself out of it, but because you now have direct evidence that another response exists and that you survive it.
This is also how I judge whether therapy is working. Not by how well someone can describe their pattern; fluency is easy to acquire and easy to hide behind. What I look for is a shift in the center of gravity, when a person meets a situation as it is, without first running it through the layer of story and management they used to need. That kind of insight lives in the body rather than the head, and it holds up under pressure. It usually arrives quietly, after a long run of moments nobody would have thought to write down.
People get articulate about their problems long before they change them.
What I Draw From
Six frameworks that work together. I draw on whatever is most useful in the moment.
Psychodynamic
The foundation. Much of what drives behavior operates outside conscious awareness. These are patterns shaped by early experience that persist because they remain unexamined.
Psychodynamic work focuses on what produces the symptom, not the symptom itself. Anxiety is rarely the core problem. It is a signal that something underneath needs attention. Understanding what generates it can resolve it for good.
Relational
I pay close attention to what happens between people, both in your relationships and in the therapy relationship itself. How you relate to me often mirrors how you relate to the important people in your life.
For couples, this means examining the patterns both partners maintain. One pursues, the other withdraws. Both contribute. Both have a role in changing it.
ISTDP (Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy)
ISTDP works directly with the anxiety and defenses that keep difficult emotions out of reach. The model identifies a triangle of forces: an underlying feeling (grief, anger, guilt, love), the anxiety that arises when it surfaces, and the defenses that keep it at a distance. These defenses were intelligent adaptations once. They persist long after they are needed, generating much of the suffering people bring to therapy.
In practice it is more concrete than it sounds. A client describes something her mother did that was genuinely unfair. I ask how she experiences the anger. She says it is tight, and it is in her chest. Rather than tell her that what she is describing is anxiety rather than anger, I ask her which it feels more like. She hears it immediately. Anger has a different quality entirely: hot, mobilized, larger than you. Tightness in the chest is not that.
So we slow it down and watch the sequence run. The anger comes up. Within a second or two it converts into tension. The tension lands as self-doubt, then guilt, then an urge to protect her mother. She has been running that sequence her whole life and has never once watched it happen. When she finds the anger underneath the tension, even for a flash — I felt it, it was coursing through my hands — it is unmistakable, and it is hers.
Then the more important question: why it gets stopped. The answer usually makes painful sense. In her case, anger at her mother was not permitted. Disagreement was met with criticism, and her account of what had happened was denied outright. Shutting the anger down, and doubting her own read on reality in order to keep trusting her mother, was the intelligent move for a child in that position. It is an expensive one for an adult. Seeing where a defense came from is what lets a person stop being identified with it.
ISTDP moves faster than traditional psychodynamic work, and it asks for a willingness to be emotionally challenged. I have written about it in more depth on the ISTDP page.
RLT (Relational Life Therapy)
Developed by Terry Real. The site of relational change is individual transformation. Under stress, everyone has a reactive, self-protective part (what RLT calls the Adaptive Child). Brilliant when you were young. The source of most relational destruction in adulthood.
I name what I see, take positions, and challenge both partners on behaviors that create distance. Honest confrontation is more respectful than colluding with what destroys the relationship.
Buddhist-Informed
Trained at Naropa University, influenced by Bruce Tift. Not a religious framework. This shapes how I think about awareness: freedom comes not from endlessly improving your situation but from loosening your identification with it.
In practice, I invite clients to stay with a feeling rather than explain it. To notice what is happening in the body rather than analyze what it means.
PACT (Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy)
Developed by Stan Tatkin. The core insight: relationship conflict is a nervous system problem. When one partner feels threatened, their nervous system activates automatically and fast. The other partner's system responds in kind. Within seconds, both people are reactive. No communication technique helps until the nervous system settles.
PACT pays attention to moment-to-moment micro-signals in session: tone, facial expression, posture, eye contact. I draw on PACT's understanding of the nervous system in my couples work, though my primary couples framework is RLT.
The therapy relationship is not just a container for the work. It is part of the work.
How It All Fits Together
These are not separate approaches I apply one at a time. They are lenses I look through simultaneously.
The psychodynamic foundation means I am listening for the pattern beneath the presenting problem. The relational orientation means I pay attention to what is happening between us. ISTDP gives me precise tools for working with anxiety and defenses. RLT gives me a framework for couples work that is direct, accountable, and focused on individual transformation. The Buddhist-informed perspective keeps the work grounded in direct experience rather than intellectual exercise. PACT contributes an understanding of the nervous system that helps explain why people react the way they do under relational stress.
For you as a client, this means you are not getting a cookbook approach. I pay attention to what is happening in front of me and draw on whatever framework is most useful in the moment. Sometimes that means slowing down and staying with a feeling you want to rush past. Sometimes it means naming a defense operating in real time. Sometimes it means challenging you on a relational pattern you have not been willing to see.
Who This Approach Works Best For
This approach is not for everyone. I think it is worth being honest about that.
If you are tired of therapy that stays at the surface. If therapy before felt supportive but not transformative, this is a different experience. I am interested in the patterns underneath the symptoms, and getting to those patterns requires willingness to be emotionally challenged.
If you are willing to look at your own contribution. Most people arrive in therapy with a clear sense of what others are doing wrong. Fine as a starting point. But lasting change comes from examining your own defenses, facing your own feelings, and taking responsibility for your own patterns.
If you value directness. I will tell you what I see, including the ways you might be contributing to your own difficulty. I do this with care, but I do it clearly. If you want a therapist who will primarily validate and support you, I may not be the right fit.
If coping strategies are not what you are after. I am less interested in techniques to manage symptoms and more interested in what generates them. If you want practical tools for getting through the day right now, a CBT or skills-based approach might serve you better. I am happy to help you find someone who works that way.
Where to Go from Here
Individual Therapy
For people working on their own patterns, defenses, and the ways they get in their own way.
Couples Therapy
For partners who want to understand the relational dynamic between them and change it.
Expat Therapy
For expats and digital nomads who want a therapist who lives this life too.
Intercultural Marriage
For couples navigating the friction that comes with different cultural backgrounds.
ISTDP
A deeper look at Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy and how it works.
Walk & Talk Therapy
Outdoor therapy on foot along the Bosphorus. In-person in Istanbul.
Therapy that works on what's driving the problem
The Other Therapy
A short video call to talk about what is going on and whether working together makes sense. No commitment.
Book a Free 20-Minute Consultation