Who We Are:

A neurotic is fundamentally someone whose conscious or unconscious choices, thoughts, words, and actions actively create suffering in their own life and in the lives of others. Rather than being a passive victim of circumstance, the neurotic is the unconscious architect of their own misery, actively seeking out, provoking, or misusing external difficulties to fulfill hidden masochistic aims.

An "Unconscious Repeating Machine": Neurotics can be incapable of creating new emotional responses as adults; instead, they are trapped in repetitive patterns of self-sabotage. They unconsciously misuse reality as a "movie screen" to endlessly reel off and replay unresolved infantile conflicts.

Psychological Immaturity: While they may look and speak like adults, psychologically, a neurotic remains emotionally stuck. They cling to an "infantile megalomania," experiencing a profound inner conflict between how they demand the world should be and how the world actually operates.

Addiction to Psychic Masochism: The neurotic builds their identity out of emotional struggle and conflict. Because they cannot tolerate the reality of being denied or ignored, their unconscious deliberately stages situations that guarantee rejection, frustration, or injury. This allows them to harvest the hidden payoff of conscious self-pity and righteous indignation.

Everyone harbors some neurotic tendencies; some of us are just more neurotic and need some help navigating through life. A person is classified as "neurotic" when the number of these self-damaging tendencies is large enough to consistently ruin their contentment, their ability to work (sublimate), and their capacity for tender love.

A neurotic is a suffering-making machine. Not because they consciously want to ruin their life or hurt the people around them, but because they are caught in a hidden pattern that keeps producing pain. The cycle usually starts with something small: a tone of voice, a delay, a disagreement, a look, or a text that does not come. The neurotic misuses outside situations that are beyond their control or none of their business as proof that they have been wronged, uses those incidents as alibis, builds a case that they are the injured party, and repeats the same pattern as if it is fate, bad luck, or everyone else’s fault.

The work I do is not just advice in the moment, although advice can be useful when someone is in the middle of a conflict. The deeper work is longer-term. It is about getting a real sense of what is happening in your life, identifying the patterns that keep repeating, and then sorting through those issues with you over time. A client may come in asking what to do about a relationship, a job, a conflict, or some immediate anxiety, but those are only the entry points. The real question is not simply what should you do. The real question is why this particular situation has become the place where your suffering has organized itself.