One of the things that are really important in therapy is that we have an understanding for what’s really happening. What that takes is an understanding of the problem geography.

I’m using geography as the metaphor of the problem at hand. If you think about geography you want to know about the latitude and longitude, the weather, what kind of flora is growing there, who lives there and you want to know the basics of what is going on in that geographic region.

If you’re having anxiety we might say that that is a “desert” problem for you and your geography is like a desert. Another person might have anxiety that is an “arctic” problem.

One of the things that often times happens is that people start therapy too soon and they try to apply polar bear, penguin intervention to a desert problem.

My goal is to make sure that I understand the geography of your situation before we ever start to intervene in it.

The better we can come to an understanding for the geography before we begin treatment, the faster and more efficient therapy is for most people and it actually ends up saving the patient time and money and we can have efforts that are really focused on what we need to accomplish.