Any change I think I can help you achieve in a three month period.

You send me an email describing where you want to be in 3 months.

Next, we discuss the desired change face-to-face. Compassion and incremental progress is the goal, not compliance — but both of us commit to you reaching your goal.

I respond with a suggestion designed to help you

• identify your triggers and patterns
• conduct experiments to broaden your awareness
• appreciate the limits of will power
• tilt your environment until it helps you lead the life you want

Via email or phone message, you report on how you act and what you think and feel — daily, occasionally, or weekly. By phone or in person, we discuss how you are doing and whether you would like me to respond with another suggestion.

This protocol has helped people eat breakfast, limit television, lose weight, and ask more questions. Contracted Change has proven particularly useful in helping people reach goals they think they should have achieved on their own.

A client who typically follows face-to-face sessions with a series of emails says:

“There are some of us for whom the written word is often a deeper way to express ourselves. Some of my most pertinent therapy moments have come from the ‘paper’. Two major ways in which you have helped me by responding to my email are:

• The responses are often integrated more quickly and reflected upon/reviewed more frequently.
• If the subject is of high emotional intensity, sometimes I cannot even approach it unless I do so first via email (this echoes your comment on the limits of will power).”

$450; no charge for clients who see me weekly