Aaron Platt, MA

I am an American living with my family in Copenhagen, Denmark. I work online in English with individuals and couples worldwide. I hold a master's in counseling from La Salle University, and a master's in sociology from UC Berkeley. At Berkeley, I specialized in social psychology and culture, which is particularly helpful for understanding the intersections among social, cultural, and psychological factors shaping the experiences of people I work with. I also completed an 18-month internship in psychodynamic therapy at the Philadelphia Consultation Center. Before therapy became my full-time work, I worked across the corporate (market research), non-profit (social and emotional support for health-related issues), and academic worlds (as a teaching assistant during my years at UC Berkeley). I also have years of experience as a therapy client, and this has shaped my work as much as my training has. I know what it's like to sit in the other chair and wonder if the therapist actually understands what you're trying to say. And I have known the relief that comes with having something click in a session that changes how you see yourself. I work from a psychodynamic framework, which means paying attention to the patterns running your life, not just the problem that brought you in. What brought you in matters, but it's usually one piece of something bigger: a way of relating to yourself, other people, and your feelings that's been operating for a long time without your noticing it. Most therapy targets symptoms: anxiety, depression, conflict, low self-esteem. My approach works with the person who has the symptoms, the patterns built in early relationships that now run on autopilot, shaping what you notice, feel, and do, mostly without your awareness. These aren't bad habits. They're how your personality organizes experience. If you can change the pattern, the symptoms tend to resolve on their own. These patterns got built in response to your actual childhood environment, and they made sense at the time. They keep running long after that environment is gone, producing the same results in new relationships, new jobs, new countries. Someone who can't stop people-pleasing isn't weak, they built a way of managing other people's reactions because it was once the safest option. The goal isn't to erase these patterns. It's to see them clearly enough that they stop running you. Note that this does not at all mean you had a bad childhood. Plenty of my clients had parents who loved them and never mistreated them. However, kids read their environment with real precision and adjust to it. A kid who senses a parent is fragile learns not to ask for much. A kid who senses a parent values achievement learns to perform. That's enough to build a lasting pattern, and it works, which is the problem: it becomes permanent. What was smart at six is running the show at thirty-six, and it doesn't feel like a pattern. It feels like "just who I am." For example, let's say a six-year-old learns that her father's moods run the house, so she gets good at reading faces and smoothing things over. Thirty years later, she's the coworker everyone calls easy to deal with, she gets a headache every Sunday, and she genuinely doesn't know what she wants for dinner. It's not that something broke; it's just that the early adaptation never got the memo that things changed. So what are sessions actually like? In session, I pay attention to how your attention works, not just what you're telling me: what you move toward, what you avoid, what you feel versus what you say you feel, where you go vague right when being specific would matter. Say you're describing a decision at work, clear and organized, and then your brother comes up and the sentences get loose. "It's complicated, you know how family is." That vagueness is a spot where your attention has learned not to land. It doesn't mean we have to go there, but it is worth my pointing it out as a pattern. If the patterns were built in a relationship, they get revised in a relationship. That's why therapy works when it works, and why self-help books, however good, can only take you so far. The relationship between us isn't background to the work, it is the work. Whatever distorts your relationships outside will show up between us too. Someone who manages everyone else's feelings will, within a month, start managing mine, softening a disagreement before I've even disagreed. When I point that out, we're not talking about the pattern anymore. We're standing inside it. My being genuinely present, honest, and actually interested in who you are, not who you're performing to be, is what makes the change possible. Sessions are conversational. No extensive intake forms, no worksheets, no homework. If I notice something, I'll say so, not as a verdict, but as something to look at together. You'll always know what I'm thinking. **My goal isn't to understand your situation, it's for you to understand yourself well enough that you don't need me anymore.** The goal isn't just to feel better. It's to actually be different: a different relationship to yourself, your feelings, other people. Not new coping tools stacked on the same patterns, but a real shift in how you organize your experience -- how you see yourself and the world around you. When that happens, the anxiety or depression or relationship trouble that brought you in resolves, not because you've learned to manage it, but because what was generating it has changed. That kind of change lasts. You don't have to keep practicing it, the way you do with tools. It's the difference between compensating for a limp and healing the leg. This tends to work well for people who've tried other things. Maybe other therapy felt good to be heard in, but nothing changed. Maybe you've read every self-help book, understand your patterns intellectually, and still can't stop repeating them. If what's keeping you stuck isn't willpower or the right technique but something you can't quite see about yourself, this is for you.