FAQs
Satori & Sage was founded with one goal in mind: to provide people with the resources they need to grow in all aspects of their lives. In appointments with Dr. Shea Kamlet, you can expect a partner who encourages you in your growth by utilizing a combination of integrative health therapy and holistic psychotherapy.
I would like to improve my relationship. How can therapy help?
All couples experience times when things aren’t working – disappointment, frustration and self doubt can sabotage intimate relationships. Difficulties can arise causing us to view our partner somehow as part of the problem as opposed to part of the solution. Marriage counseling can help you understand your partner’s perspective and explore the issues that may have too difficult to discuss without a facilitator. It can allow you to be heard and to really listen to your partner’s deepest desires and needs.
If this is where you are in your life, take heart! Many people experiencing relationship difficulties turn to therapy to help them meet and overcome life’s challenges.
Why engage in couples counseling?
Couples counseling is a collaborative process. You are the expert of you, and you know your relationship better than anyone else! Counseling couples, Dr. Kamlet shares strategies and solutions that help couples get unstuck and move toward their goals. Working together with Dr. Kamlet, you are more likely to realize your goals.
How long will it take to see results?
Typically, the therapeutic process begins with a consultation. This is a great opportunity for Dr. Kamlet to become more familiar with you, your concerns and the shifts you would like to occur in your relationship. Together you and Dr. Kamlet will establish realistic expectations for therapy that are uniquely created for you based upon your goals and budget. Working with Dr. Kamlet, previous clients experienced a sense of relief in the early stages of therapy.
How do you pick the best therapist for you?
Consistently, research indicates that the single most significant factor in the therapeutic relationship is the goodness of fit. Consequently, it is vital that you feel free to engage openly and honestly with your therapist. Usually one or two sessions will be enough for you to determine whether the therapist is someone you are willing to trust as you take this most sacred of journeys.
What is unique about Dr. Kamlet’s approach?
When we feel uncertain about how to move forward, it can be helpful to work with someone who gives us focused attention, asks intuitive questions, and gently leads us to a clearer understanding. Dr. Shea Kamlet believes that each of us is doing the very best we can with the resources we have. Therapy is an effective way of expanding our resources. Her warm and empathetic manner invites clients to to explore their relationship openly and honestly, which allows opportunities for healing and repair. Dr. Kamlet’s years of experience and training promote success in the couples counseling process.
Therapy helps by enhancing our awareness, by giving us insight into the areas of our lives that may have been outside of our awareness. We see familiar situations and events in a new light, often discovering awareness of interpersonal patterns in relationships, patterns of self-defeating behavior, or coping behaviors that we have leaned on in the past that are outdated and ineffective. Therapy helps you develop new strategies to help you manage relationship challenges more effectively.
Working with Dr. Kamlet, maintaining a curious and kind attitude toward yourself and your partner becomes natural, so you can become more familiar with your personal patterns and strengths as well as the areas that contribute to your distress. Self-awareness gives you access to aspects of yourself that are outside of your awareness. Self-awareness gives you the ability to choose your response with your partner and other situations, rather than reacting habitually. It gives you choice, where before there was none. Choice is empowering and liberating!
It is virtually impossible to see yourself in all of your complexity, as others do, without the benefit of a neutral, objective professional. Working with a trusted therapist will enable you to explore and discover yourself in a way that makes authentic living possible.
Distress can actually fuel the process!
Instinctively, we want to pull away from painful experiences. It may be surprising to discover that the very circumstance you want so badly to get away from may be exactly the situation you need to propel you toward your personal goals. When you are dealing with relationship distress, it is easy to lose sight of your strengths and abilities. It is human nature to want your struggles to disappear. It is the very process of digging deep and powering through the obstacles that often serves as the basis for transformation.
Challenges can be opportunities in disguise.
Life transitions, such as separation/divorce, infertility, infidelity and bringing home a new baby, despite or maybe because of the upheaval they bring with them, can be invitations to re-evaluate your priorities and your resources. When you view your circumstances as an opportunity to examine the things that truly matter to you, it is possible to feel empowered rather than victimized. Accept the invitation to develop a more intimate relationship with yourself and with your partner….get curious!
The path of self discovery can be painful, exhilarating, frustrating, enlightening – it’s always interesting. As you learn about yourself, what makes you tick, what situations let you thrive, what frustrates you and pushes you well beyond your limits, what things and people truly matter to you and how you truly want to spend your time, a whole new horizon opens up before you. Bringing those awarenesses into your relationship can enrich your experience partner’s experience of you and your shared time together. Start living the life that matters to you.
Why do we pick the relationship partners that we do?
We tend to pick relationship partners that are the perfect mate to help us work through these very patterns and conflicts. Couples counseling is a forum for developing greater insight into the agreement in the relationship, the meanings you have attached to those agreements and to develop the capacity to be curious with your partner. The natural consequence of such endeavors is intimacy. Through her work with couples, Dr. Kamlet has discovered that emotional and physical intimacy are often areas that can be strengthened in relationships through couples counseling and marriage therapy.