PSYCHOTHERAPIST
Josh Conner, LMSW, PhD (he/him)
“Every journey has a secret destination of which the traveler is unaware.”
– Martin BuberYou might seek therapy for any number of reasons – to deal with feelings like sadness, anxiety, or low self-esteem; to stop repeating patterns that you know make matters worse but can’t seem to change; or perhaps to wrestle with a deep challenge - an illness, a trauma, a loss.
Whatever brings you here, therapy offers a space to slow down, reflect on your life, and sense what your thoughts and feelings have to tell you about where you've come from and where you're going.
While we might work on coping skills or reducing symptoms, therapy is ultimately about building a deeper relationship to your life - alive to your experiences, capable of having deep and rich relationships, and rooted in an expansive sense of your own inner complexity and strength.
My style is mutual, playful, direct and authentic. I will offer my experience and expertise when I think they might be useful, but the core of our work will be a conversation. My task within that will be to meet you where you are, understand your experience with as much clarity and empathy as I can, and help guide you into deeper conversation with yourself. In return, I’ll invite you to engage your inner world with courage and honesty, and listen for what it has to offer you.
I draw on mindfulness-based and psychodynamic approaches to help that process unfold. I work with a sense that we are vaster than we realize, and that insight and growth require becoming aware of aspects of ourselves that are usually outside of awareness. To do that, we might use mindfulness to go deeper into feelings and emotions; engage in experiments with movement or posture; work with memories and dreams; and find other paths for accessing deep implicit processing.
I work with adults at all stages of life, as well as couples. I have experience with many conditions, but here are some areas where I have a special interest:
Developmental trauma, childhood trauma and Complex PTSD (C-PTSD)
Living well within the limits of chronic illness (ME/CFS, fibromyalgia, Ehlers-Danlos, etc.)
Burnout, narcissistic abuse/toxic relationships, and other chronic injuries to our capacity to sense our dignity
Grief, loss, and major life transitions
Integrating deeper feelings into intellectual and creative work
I completed my MSW at Fordham University, with clinical internships at the Cadman Counseling Center in Brooklyn Heights and the Department of Family Support and Services in Chicago. I have worked in inpatient, community, and outpatient mental health settings.
I have specialty training in psychodynamic (Jungian and relational models) and sensorimotor psychotherapy (a mindfulness-based and body-oriented approach to healing trauma and developmental injuries), as well as a continuing interest in the conversation between mindfulness, neuroscience, and psychotherapy.
In a former life, I taught philosophy at the college level, an experience that still shapes my sense of the vocation of therapy. I consider it an honor to sit with people, as they experience the joys and sorrows of life, and to take up the question at the heart of philosophy and therapy: How shall we live?
License #121099
