Half of my practice has been helping couples for most of my practice life. My specialty in working with couples includes helping with concerns related to parenting and your relationships with your children. I work with families to strengthen the bonds between children and parents, to strengthen the parenting alliance, to help the family build flexibility and responsiveness to its changing needs over time.
My commitment as a couple and family therapist is to bring everything I have learned and everything of myself to help you find your best selves in and through your relationship to each other. As a couple therapist I help you find ways to share the more vulnerable experiences and feelings that strengthen your bond and bring you closer to each other. I help you become experts at untangling and stepping back from the patterns and processes in which you get stuck. I aim to help you deepen your connection so that you can always know how to get to the source with your partner. As a family therapist I help you open the channels of emotional conversation between you and your children and teens. I help you to help your kids have a sense of safety in sharing with you. I left family therapy behind for many years until I began to learn to work as an Emotionally Focused Family Therapist–a model of therapy based in an understanding of Attachment. This beautiful model of family therapy really helps families. Read more about how I think about couple therapy
In individual therapy the relationship we develop becomes a context in which you can think and feel about your relationship to yourself and to others. I bring a practice life of commitment, creativity, genuine engagement, and also the flaws of my own humanity. I think with you about your experience from a psychodynamic, contemporary, relational psychoanalytic frame of reference, but I have been strongly influenced by the experiential, somatic, expressive and narrative therapies and take an active approach, doing whatever is practical, to help you connect with your deepest and most true self. I see psychotherapy as an enormously valuable gift, not only in healing painful experience, but also in creating a meaningful life.
I have loved my work as a psychotherapist since 1982. When I count it up, though, I have been involved in the world of helping and psychotherapy for 50 years. (I started young!) I was reading at fifteen about psychotherapy. I was in process and therapy groups out of curiosity and interest about psychotherapy and also because of my own struggles as a teenager. I took part in trans-personal groups with Laura Huxley in the mid-sixties and took part in a racism encounter group later in that decade. I was a coordinator of a peer-counseling program on the UC Davis campus in the early seventies and a little later a houseparent at group home. This was all before earning my Bachelors Degree and there was much more. When I found my way to my formal path as a psychotherapist, after teaching for a handful of years, I knew I was in my calling. I don’t mean calling in a puffed up way. I mean it in the sense of finding the deepest meaning in being involved in the things of heart and soul. I mean it in the sense of deep fit. I don’t mean it in the sense of perfection. I make regular errors and look back every five years to see how much I did not yet understand.
I know I can’t, but would like to figure it all out before the end of my life. I never stop learning. I always continue to read, go to workshops and seminars, connect with colleagues to learn and share. For the past 14 years I have been in the midst of intense learning, working to fully integrate the Emotionally Focused model of Couple & Family Therapy. I am a Certified Emotionally Focused Therapist and Supervisor.
Thank you for exploring my website,
Robert Ogner