Sean M. Dowdy, PhD

The willingness to examine oneself—with honesty, curiosity, wonder, but also ambivalence and doubt—might be one of the bravest achievements of any human life. Acknowledging and respecting that courage in clients is my first sacred duty as a therapist. Many more sacred duties follow but, overall, I endeavor to provide a ritual-like time and space to work through my clients’ emotional lives toward ends of transformation, healing/remediation, repair, play, and creation. My approach to psychoanalysis and psychotherapy is to understand the role of one’s past in the present in order to create a better future. With a background in anthropology, I moreover find therapy to be an exercise where the strange things about ourselves and others are made familiar as much as familiar things about the same are made strange. It is an exercise in getting un-stuck, in grasping the multiple ways we can live with others on this beautiful yet fragile world, and in building something new for ourselves and for future generations.