Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist, Personal Coach

FREE HALF-HOUR INITIAL CONSULTATION

Specialties: Couples therapy and personal coaching. (For an explanation of the differences between therapy and personal coaching, see the article toward the bottom of this page.)

Personal Statement
I would love to join you on your personal journey. I hope that over time you will be better able to do what writer Anna Quindlen advised a college graduating class: “Go take a leap of faith and fearlessness into the arms of the great adventure of an authentic life.”

    For Couples Therapy Clients: Are you feeling the deep loneliness and hurt that comes from being in an unhappy relationship? Do you feel that your partner  isn’t there for you when you need support the most? It’s sad to see that pain drain the energy out of you and affect other areas of your life, including your ability to work, parent and attend to your health. When couples are committed to repairing their broken connections, our first goal is for each person to communicate their primary causes of relationship pain and ensure that their partner fully heard them. They move away from "attack and defend" mode and find new ways to live together lovingly and respectfully.

    For Individual Therapy Clients: Each person has a unique definition of happiness. What's yours? Loving relationships with family and friends? Exhilarating adventures? Serenity? A career you adore? Good health? Self-esteem? Passion? The satisfaction of helping others? It's probably a combination of these things and others that bring special meaning to your life. But life invariably presents external and internal roadblocks to your bliss. Those obstacles might be rooted in unhealed childhood wounds or more recent events. Therapy can help you identify and deal with the roadblocks you can do something about and make peace with those things you cannot change. Therapy involves exploring the mental and emotional elements of both the present and the past, and it can address serious mental health issues such as depression, anxiety and unresolved grief.

    For Personal Coaching Clients: Personal coaching could be the best route if you want to improve your quality of life in a goal-focused way, without delving into your past or talking much about your current emotional issues. Areas that coaching clients often concentrate on are specific personal objectives, issues of life balance and work-related challenges. As their coach, I help clients identify and prioritize goals and create action plans for achieving them. Each week, clients agree to accomplish certain steps in their action plans prior to their next coaching sessions. This accountability helps keep clients on track, rather than getting so distracted by the busy-ness of daily life that their larger goals get lost in the shuffle.

Service Locations: Available to work with therapy clients in California and with coaching clients both inside and outside of California. 

Insurance Accepted (For Therapy Clients Only): Any plan that accepts out-of-network providers; I provide clients with monthly superbills to submit to their insurance carriers for partial reimbursement of therapy costs

Electronic Payment Options: Accepts Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover and debit cards

Education & Licensure: M.A., Clinical Psychology, Pepperdine University, MFC 42747

Memberships: California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists, Conejo Valley Mental Health Professionals Association

Accreditation: Certified anger management provider 

Keep the Spark Alive:        Tips for Couples
By Renée Haas

Maintaining a healthy connection with your partner can be challenging in today's busy world. Here are a few tips and conversation starters to help keep your relationship alive, pleasurable and enriching.

•    Create a relationship "wish list." Each partner writes down 10-15 things they consider to be part of an ideal relationship. Then the partners review each other’s lists and develop one list that includes the major things they will strive to achieve together.

•    Especially if you have children, be sure to schedule at least one adults-only "date night" per week. Switch off who gets to pick where to go and what to do. Use your imagination. Surprise each other. Have fun.

•    Choose platinum over gold. The Golden Rule asks that you treat others as you would like to be treated. The Platinum Rule encourages you to treat others (including your partner) as they would like to be treated.

•    If a disagreement is getting too heated, one of the partners can call a time out. That person then takes responsibility for re-raising the issue sometime within the next 24 hours, when the partners have calmed down and can communicate more productively.

•    Have a quiz night. Ask your partner 5-10 questions about yourself, such as "Who do I consider to be my best friend and why?" or "What was my favorite vacation we’ve taken together?" Even in long-term relationships, there's always plenty you can learn about each other.

•    Share with your partner what lessons about relationships you learned from your family-of-origin. Explore which lessons have been helpful and harmful. Tell your partner several relationship skills you learned from him or her.

•

Help! Do I Need a Therapist or a Personal Coach?
By Renée Haas

You know you want to improve your qualify of life, and you’ve decided to seek professional help. Now one of your choices is whether to use the services of a psychotherapist or a personal coach. What are the differences?

To begin with, people seeking therapy often have a fairly significant problem, such as depression, anxiety, major relationship distress or bereavement. Coaching clients are usually high-functioning people who are looking to their coach to help them address specific situations in a focused, action-oriented way.

Many therapists believe it’s important for clients to deal with unresolved issues from the past before they can optimally live in the present and fulfill their potential for the future.

In addition to addressing the current stressors that may have brought them to therapy, clients often explore such topics as patterns of past relationships with other people, including their families of origin. In the process, the clients frequently deal with emotional issues, heal past wounds and develop self-insight that can guide them more productively in the present and future.

Personal coaching, on the other hand, almost exclusively focuses on pragmatic elements of the present and future. Coaches and clients work together to assess major facets of the clients’ current lives, articulate goals in areas the clients want to address and develop action plans related to meeting those goals. Along the way, coaches help motivate clients and keep them accountable in order to produce results.

Licensed therapists must meet rigorous requirements related to advanced education and licensure, and they must abide by specific laws and codes of ethics. At this point, personal coaching is an unlicensed, self-regulating industry. Certification is optional.

When and where do coaching and therapy take place? Although this is not always the case, psychotherapy clients typically come in once a week to their therapists’ offices. Coaches usually go to locations convenient to their clients or, more commonly, they work over the phone and via e-mail.

Those are just some of the distinctions between therapy and coaching. Despite the differences, therapists and coaches are both oriented toward tapping into clients’ potential and helping them lead more fulfilled lives. They just go about it in different ways.

Did You Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions?
By Renée Haas

Here we are, well into 2008. Are you proudly continuing to make progress on your New Year’s Resolutions? Did you already accomplish them and check them off your “To Do” list? Or did they fall into the “Oops,” “Well, I really meant to”…. or other category of  good intentions that didn't quite translate into action?

What can you do to keep your New Year’s Resolutions and, in general, increase your ability to follow through on self-improvement goals?

A couple of key components in creating lasting change are to know yourself well and to build pleasure into the process.

For example, if you want to lose weight and improve your health, you might join a gym even though you’re not a “gym person” at heart. After a few weeks of doing cardiovascular exercise on a treadmill or elliptical machine, you might be bored to pieces and throw in the towel on the concept of exercising altogether.

If you had done some self-exploration before joining the gym, you might have remembered how much you loved playing AYSO soccer as a kid. Or you might have noted how much you look forward to watching one of the dancing shows currently so popular on television. If that’s the case, you might be better off joining an adult soccer league or signing up for salsa lessons through your local parks and recreation department. You’d be getting your exercise in a way that meets your personal criteria for fun.

Other elements of successful change are making realistic goals with short-term steps, and forgiving yourself when you stumble.

Some goals seem so overwhelming that people essentially give up on ever achieving them. But small, incremental improvements can be very powerful over time.

If your marriage is foundering, rather than creating a large, unspecific objective such as “We need to improve our communication,” start with small, achievable positive statements. These might include things such as, “During the coming week, I will make a sincere effort to stop interrupting my wife when she’s speaking to me” or “By next weekend, I will plan a date night with my husband where we can talk in a quiet restaurant away from the kids.”

Achieving these goals and seeing the positive results can then feed your belief that larger, more global changes are possible if you keep working toward them.

Compassion toward yourself can also go a long way. If you’re on a diet and find yourself face-down in Belgian chocolate one day, that doesn’t have to mean your diet is a permanent failure. Be kind to yourself, look at what triggered your slip, take a break if needed and then get back on track when you’re ready.

And don’t be ashamed to ask for backup. Enlist the help of your partner, a friend or relative, a therapist or life coach to achieve your goals. Life is short. Commit yourself to achieving your dreams, starting today.