How I Work
CHERYL HENRY, MA LMHC
Child, Family & Individual
Psychotherapy
My therapeutic approach is conversational, collaborative and relational. My role as a therapist is to support children and their parents, as well as adult individuals, in their experiences as they form a deeper awareness of who they have been, who they are now and who they are becoming both as individuals and in relationships. In therapy I seek to encourage my clients to take personal responsibility for their roles in their relationships so that they have greater potential freedom and creativity in their lives. In the context of a healing or therapeutic relationship new ways of behaving and personal resources emerge. Change occurs as a result of awareness of our emotional lives and how we relate with others. I hope to support my clients as they become more curious and self-aware, and help them to safely explore emotional responses as they learn to tolerate and solve problems while deepening their relationships.
Real empathy isn’t just about knowing that other people feel the same way you do: it’s about knowing that they don’t feel the same way and caring anyway. – Gopnik, Meltzoff, & Kuhl from The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells us About the Mind.
Phenomenology
The approaches to psychotherapy I draw from hold in common an attitude of respectful listening and close attention to clients’ beliefs and their search for meaning. My studies include Existential Phenomenology, which is a psychological school of thought that draws upon our lived experience as the basis for understanding one another. Our experience as individuals is unlike anyone else’s, yet as humans we have so many experiences in common. When we experience trauma, emotional or physical, we essentially lose something of ourselves and we find our worlds changed. This lostness and alienation is frightening and painful, and we may find that we cannot find an emotional “home” without help.
The essence of emotional trauma…[is] a catastrophic loss of innocence that permanently alters one’s sense of being-in-the-world… -Robert D. Stolorow from Trauma and Human Existence.
We can find ourselves again in the midst of a safe and understanding relationship.
Attachment and Reflective Thinking
My work and study with attachment theory and reflective practices informs much of what I do as a therapist. I believe that while treating babies, small children, and sometimes children through adolescence the relationship between parent and child is the client although an adolescent will sometimes come to counseling as an individual.
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