I recall a young man I had been working with for about 8 months arriving in my office with a glowing smile and shining eyes. He was beaming as he spoke, and I was struck with the contrast of his appearance in that final session with the young anxious and depressed man I remember interviewing in our first session. He started by telling me he’s in a relationship, he’s enjoying her company and he is confident in his appearance since he’s been consistent and disciplined in his weight training. He states that he continues to meditate and is very grateful for the work we have done together. He goes as far as saying “Dr. Andrekus you have changed my life”. Of course, I bring credit back to him and remind him of all the good work he has done in therapy and his persistence with the renewed concentration and confidence he developed through his daily meditation and exercise.
This “work” brings me joy and certainly not all my works goes so smoothly but this is what I trained for and chose as a profession. I feel grateful to do the work of enhancing human being’s potential.
As a clinical psychologist it has been my privilege to walk many paths with patient’s over varied emotional and traumatic terrain through lives of hardship and challenge. I bring wisdom from a body of knowledge gleaned from my own life experiences, from my nearly 50 years of clinical experience and from the bounteous teachings handed down from centuries of Buddhist teachings.
The focus of this website will be educational I will offer talks and resources to assist people suffering from a life of anxiety and depression, addiction and chronic pain. There are talks on managing stress, insomnia, relationship issues and changing persistent maladaptive behavior. I emphasize education and the therapeutic relationship to offer a safe place to learn about our nervous system, and how our patterns of learned behavior and beliefs can be self- limiting and foster a neurotic view of the world. “Today’s thoughts are the seeds for tomorrows reality” according to so many great teachers and Yogis. To identify and name patterns of catastrophic thinking is to render them as less powerful forces in our daily lives. Some Buddhist teachers say, “to name our demons is to make them less powerful”. It is the task of psychotherapy to help my patients be less impacted by our unconscious “demons”. In Freud’s model of psychotherapy, he instructed the vision of psychoanalysis is to “make the unconscious conscious”. This resonates so beautifully with teachings from the Dharma, the body of Buddha’s teachings, in which we are advised to be mindful and concentrated on what is arising in the body and mind thus being more capable of discerning what a wise course of action is before us.
I hope that users of this site will find it helpful to listen to the talks, read the material and check out the links provided to enhance their wisdom and have greater choices in dealing with difficulties in life.
“As a clinical psychologist it has been my privilege to walk many paths with patient’s over varied emotional and traumatic terrain through lives of hardship and challenge”
