Performance
Psychotherapy for people whose work asks a great deal of them
Some people choose a demanding life on purpose: athletes in and out of season, founders, surgeons, traders, attorneys, musicians, and others for whom the work is never finished and the mind does not stop when the day does. For them intensity is a condition of the work they care about, and many arrive having noticed that the way they drive themselves has begun to cost them, at home, in the body or in the work itself.
What brings people here
The people we see here are not short of discipline. Most have more of it than the problem requires. What they are up against is a pattern: a performance that is better in practice than when it counts, a career that is going well while a marriage is not, a mind that can no longer rest from the work, a season ended by injury and the question of who one is without the sport. Patterns can be understood, and that is the work.
Men and boys remain the center of this practice. This part of it is open to women and men alike.
The order of the work
People who perform for a living usually arrive with the opponent already named: the exam, the deadline, the market, the other team. In our experience the work goes in a different order. First you have to be able to find yourself under pressure, to know what you actually feel and want in the moment the stakes are highest, rather than what you were taught to feel there. Then you have to contend with yourself: the habits of mind that take over when it counts, the harshness turned inward, the way attention leaves the present to rehearse a failure or replay one. Only after that does the opponent become the real subject.
The four questions this practice is organized around apply here with particular force: what the pattern is and what keeps it going; what happens when feeling outruns judgment; what was learned early about winning, worth and being watched, often from a father or a coach; and what the work is for, because a life organized entirely around the next performance tends, in time, to stop feeling like a life.
What we work on
Skills from dialectical behavior therapy for the moments that go wrong: the surge of anger or fear before a performance, the shutdown after a mistake, the decision made in a state you would not have chosen, practiced on your actual week rather than described in the abstract. Psychodynamic work for what the pressure means to you in particular, since two people with the same record and the same stakes rarely carry them the same way, which is why Cognitive Behavioral Psychoanalysis (CBP), the model this practice works from, begins with a formulation of you rather than a protocol for the category. And steady attention to the rest of the life, the marriage, the body and the friendships, that a demanding career quietly draws down.
Dr. Inzinna and Mr. Espinal both coached before they trained as therapists, and have kept a coach's interest in how a person trains, not only in how they compete. The weekly appointment is held through the season and the off-season.
Students and young athletes
Students and young athletes, with their parents and, where useful, their coaches, see Mr. Espinal, LMSW, at the same office. Performance work with Mr. Espinal
Working together
The first conversation is a free 15-minute phone call with Dr. Inzinna or Mr. Espinal. Sessions are held in person at our office on East 89th Street.