Charlotte Howorth, LCSW, is a psychotherapist with more than 30 years of experience working with individuals, couples, and groups. She integrates Focusing-Oriented Therapy, Relational Self Psychology, Spiritual Psychology, and EMDR. Her central aim is to help people become present to their lives as they are actually lived, free of old roles, distortions, and the lingering weight of trauma. She is the former Clinical Director and current Clinical Consultant of the Center for Human Development and Family Services in New York City. She also leads supervision and consultation groups for psychotherapists. Her practice is based in Brooklyn, New York.
My Approach
Focusing Relational Self Psychology
I draw from the training in, and practice of, many different therapeutic approaches including transpersonal (spiritual) psychotherapy, EMDR, CDOI, Process Orientated Psychotherapy, Marriage and Family Therapy, Group Therapy, and Gestalt Therapy.
Every human being is so unique that I feel it is important to draw from a wide variety of approaches and traditions. While these approaches can inform me I integrate the understandings I have gained from each into a Focusing Relational Self Psychological Orientation. This orientation helps me to navigate the wide variety of issues, needs, questions, and complexities of human experience.
So what is Focusing Relational Self Psychology? I understand that within the problems and conundrums that bring people into therapy such as anxiety, depression, addictions, feelings of isolation, problems in assertion and self esteem, that implicit in these problems are the answers to moving forward. As Eugene Gendlin, the father of Focusing says, ‘Every problem has within it it’s own forward movement’. I feel that problems we have in our lives are important messages from ‘a deeper part of the self’ that is trying to get heard, perhaps parts that have been ignored, shunned and abandoned. Making contact with these parts of ourselves brings surprising insights, shifts and healing. As our formally difficult places become known and slowly accepted they are no longer so problematic and as they become integrated we become more whole, actualized, and present as people.
As a therapist I am guided by these deep felt meanings that are just under the surface of every human struggle. I want to build the kind of relationship in which the therapeutic partnership can find safety, trust, and freedom to access the implicit felt meanings that are carried in deep bodily knowings that we all have and don’t necessarily notice. It is the development and nurturing of this relationship with the deeper, greater ‘more’, that all of us have access to, that brings fresh new life and sense of being at home into our lives.