About

“”, Sessions begin with greetings from Buddy.

As you open the door to my waiting room, you will hear bells jingling. Don’t be alarmed! The bells are on the door to alert me you are here! I get so engrossed in therapy sessions that sometimes I don’t hear the next person come in – hence the bells!

Buddy, my therapy dog, and I get so excited when a new person arrives! Buddy’s enthusiasm may steal a few seconds of our time. He likes to be reassured that you notice and are eager to know him. After a few minutes, Buddy will fall asleep on your feet, next to the couch, or on the floor by his stuffed animal.

I would show you some pictures of Buddy working as a therapy dog, but they are confidential. No one seems to want photos of themselves on a psychologist’s website – imagine that!

Surprisingly comfortable introduction…

Many of my patients have told me that their first session was much more comfortable than they thought it would be.

I often hear, “I was so nervous about the first session, but within a few minutes, I forgot you were a psychologist and felt like I was talking to an old friend (not too old, I hope!). Only you are infinitely more interested in me than any friend has ever been.”

Here’s a therapy joke I made up:

The best part of therapy is getting all the attention all the time. The worst part of therapy is getting all the attention all the time.

In sessions, sometimes you will enjoy having 100% of my attention. And naturally, there will be times when you want to run, dodge, and quickly find a reason to cancel your session.

Gritty Therapy is about gaining emotional resilience and relational stamina.

People who work with me quickly realize that I am not like one of their friends. I will not agree with you to avoid conflict or say things like, “Oh dear, what a shame!” to make you feel better.

Unlike other bobblehead therapists you may have seen in the past, this is not a game where I tell you exactly what you want to hear. You can pay someone else to do that.

Avoidance is my middle name, so I can sense it and stomp it out faster than you can say, “Therapy.”

“Therapy with Dr. Roth is very much a dialog that functions better if you aren’t afraid to hear direct, honest feedback.” 

Therapy is a genuine relationship between two people.

There will be times when I disappoint you, or you get irritated with me during a session. For example, I may annoy you by asking you to look at something happening in your relationship from a different perspective.

Recently, a 20-something I work with asked me, “Why do you always take my mother’s side?”

This question may sound funny, but we landed on a core issue for this young man. Growing up, he always felt like his parents took his brother’s side and never listened to his perspective.

When conflict arises, he gets loud and combative, ensuring that he is heard and not ignored (like he was in his family).

It takes courage to express strong, uncomfortable feelings in real life. It takes even more to do so in therapy.

Yet, this is where all growth happens in Gritty Therapy!

Seeing how you relate to me provides me with precious information about how you interact with the people in your life.

If you will let me see all sides of yourself, with all your personality bumps and booboos – watch out – you may witness me get up and do the Snoopy dance!

I am jumping up and down because seeing how you relate to me provides me with precious information about how you interact with the people in your life.

And you may dance, too, as it may be the first time you have been in a disagreement where no one in the room is spinning out of control or spewing evidence at you to prove their point.

The goal of Gritty Therapy is to hold up a mirror for you.

That mirror shows you what you look like when you are disappointed, angry, or sulking.

Unlike real life, therapy can slow things down to help you develop an awareness of your knee-jerk reaction to challenges and obstacles. Becoming aware allows us to see how you react to perceived criticism or rejection, and this is when the emotional regulation skills that I teach come into play.

I can hold up a mirror, and you can get a glance at how the people in your life see you when you are disappointed, angry, or avoidant.

As you describe the challenges in your life each week, I will listen carefully to what you say and how you say it.

Listening provides me with clues about what you could have done differently to have a better outcome. I will zero in on what triggers you and what you unwittingly do to trigger people close to you.

We will talk about what you do to self-sabotage and perpetuate the challenges in your life.

What is supposed to happen in therapy anyway? How do I know if it is working?

The primary goal of therapy is to develop a better understanding of yourself. I believe that therapy works best when it is a dialog, especially if you are open to receive direct feedback from your therapist. When you talk about the challenges in your life, and your interpersonal interactions, I will help you see yourself more honestly. Most of us are not aware of how we come across to others when we are having strong feelings such as anger, frustration or anxiety. Once you are able to understand how to manage your feelings more effectively, you will stop unintentionally pushing others away and connect in a more vulnerable way. <A quick example: perhaps you are a “big talker” and many people you interact with feel you talk too much and they cannot get a word in edgewise. Most of your friends won’t tell you this! But wouldn’t you like to know this so you can change it?

I am a non-traditional therapist who believes that people deserve to know if they are inadvertently turning off the people in their life. Or if they are stuck in their own heads and unable to be present, we need to know how this affects the people in our lives as well. GRITTY THERAPY is not for the faint of heart. While therapy helps you understand how other people see you, it also helps you understand what behaviors and believes you have about yourself that no longer serve you. In order to understand yourself better you also need to begin to hear the inner monologue in your head. You need to developing more knowledge about where your mind drifts off to when you are not present with others, such as while you are driving in the car or tossing and turning before bed. Our thoughts can tell us what inner conflicts and unconscious beliefs are running us behind the scenes.

The purpose of therapy is to begin to notice negative patterns that you keep repeating over and over that seem to result in the same outcome. You may begin to realize that you are having the same argument over and over again in your relationships, or that you have had a series of exactly the same relationship over and over. This is because nothing changes until you change!!!!!

Once you begin to understand your thoughts and behaviors/patterns better, you will begin to ask yourself why you keep doing things that you know are not good for you? This includes maintaining various addictions (I believe we all have addictions in the 21st century be it substances, porn, over-spending, comfort eating, napping, video games, gambling, TV and of course technology and our phones. And the list goes on!! Continuing to do things that you know are not good for you causes you to disconnect from yourself and others. Ultimately we begin to separate ourselves from others because we suffer from intense feelings of self-loathing that we may not be aware of until therapy gets going.

Lastly, in therapy you will examine the way you connect with people and learn why it can be so hard for you to sustain meaningful connections with the people you love. You will start to notice when connection comes easily, and when you feel stuck in avoidance/irritability and don’t want to connect. Ultimately, our failures at intimate connection comes from our inability to trust love. Unfortunately dysfunctional families have become the norm and most of us did not have excellent role models when it comes to love. I will help you understand what types of communication you need to change to be more effective, feel less lonely and isolated, and better able to feel more present with the people in your life. At the end of therapy you should know and understand yourself better, feel liberated from shame and self loathing and most importantly feel able to change what is not working in your life by having the courage to be honest with yourself. And the best part is that at the end of a positive therapeutic experience you will feel more confident in yourself and better able to be calm in stressful situations.