https://www.jonathannadlman.com/home daily 1.0 2021-08-25 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/60fea57628d9fc76add22bc1/t/61140a51fef13f17f7f8d2af/1629935326738/Cholick_20210809_O7A3448.jpg Home Life affords us many invitations to grow; to crack our hearts open and become whole again. The loss of a loved one, the ending of a career or the inability to find one, the end of a relationship, tragedy, evolving beyond the consciousness of our parents or peers, unexplained anxiety or depression are all directing us inward to find wholeness and meaning from our pain. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/60fea57628d9fc76add22bc1/t/61140d5110f2954ceaee4851/1629935081355/unsplash-image-l5b_Jd8Ttfg.jpg Home https://www.jonathannadlman.com/about daily 0.75 2021-08-25 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/60fea57628d9fc76add22bc1/t/6114110a0785236e15a8c902/1628705045714/Cholick_20210809_O7A3643.jpg About - Hi, I’m Jonathan Nadlman, At two weeks old I was adopted into a large intensely loving and chaotic family colored by and imbued with a full range of family dysfunction and damage including generational mental illness, depression, bi-polarity, rage and money addiction, acting out in the face of deep suffering and a bit of schizophrenia. We witnessed and battled firsthand the effects of drug abuse, infidelity, divorce, suicidality and chronic turmoil. I found myself, way too early in life, forced to be a loving caretaker with a tendency toward pathological lying and a horrible temper. When managing everyone else’s needs, my frustration became my perpetual anxiety and it was all way too much. While exquisitely attuned to everyone else’s feelings, my own feelings and needs remained a complete mystery to me. Although I didn’t recognize it as such at the time, one might refer to my experience as either “trial by fire” or early “on the job training” as the precursor for what would become my passion, my pursuit and my career. I discovered very early on the depth of my sensitivity and empathy which both inspired and encouraged the development of a complicated and sophisticated set of emotional management skills and defenses. Not a unique story, but one that indeed determined my life’s path. I managed to escape at age 18 to UCSD as a computer science major to secure my future and make my parents proud. But a year in a half into this pursuit, my anxiety was no better and I still couldn’t identify, much less understand most of my own feelings. Then one dark and desperate day, rather than sit for my computer programming midterm, I found myself hiding in the back of a lecture on abnormal psychology. For the first time up until that very point in my life, it was clear to me what I wanted my life’s path to be. As a result I have spent my adult life unlearning my inherited shame and self doubt. I have since become intimately familiar with the internal landscape of soul and Self and how it is colored by trauma and contorted by loss and insecurity. I also understand the complexes we humans construct to avoid confronting the hard truths in and about ourselves. Playing too safe or small or too big and all the while being unable to feel okay or authentic and right sized. As a clinical psychotherapist I aim to teach people how to recognize and then dismantle and correct the behaviors and personality constructs that no longer serve them. I combine compassion and humanity along with a multi-faceted, open hearted yet pragmatic approach to helping and guiding hundreds of clients discover and develop the necessary tools to stop destructive and painful patterns. https://www.jonathannadlman.com/contact daily 0.75 2021-08-23 https://www.jonathannadlman.com/services daily 0.75 2021-08-25 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/60fea57628d9fc76add22bc1/t/611c290d59b6956e7a80a463/1629235522399/Cholick_20210809_O7A3532.jpg Working With Me - Working With Me While I’m a professional with over 30 years of clinical experience as a therapist, I am not interested or willing to hide behind some veneer of professionalism. Personally and professionally my unabashedly broken open-heart serves as a beacon and model for others attracting men and women who are interested and in desperate need of a fully embodied life. I have been cracked open only to realize that I am whole inside and I’m teaching others to do the same. I invite you to sit with me courageously at the alchemical fires of purification and change. I invite you to unearth your pain and the places you got hurt, where you defended against your sensitivity, and where the wounds were left in their place. Let us identify and untangle your defenses and coping strategies, set down the distractions and addictions, and acknowledge and grow your emotional awareness, enhance your gifts, and develop genuine self care. These tools can dramatically improve your relationship with Self, others, and your work. And help you to withstand the inevitable challenges and triumphs of life. In this quest I have witnessed men and women find their tears and hurt, anger and terror, hopelessness and despair. However, on the same path they have reclaimed their joy and lightness of being. Buoyed by emotional awareness, tenderness and compassion for the selves and others. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/60fea57628d9fc76add22bc1/t/611c299e5b05595385eb8ad9/1629235636546/IMG_1452-Edit.jpg Working With Me - Relationships With Self, with career, and with an intimate partner. Each confronts us in its own way. Partnership does so in a particularly challenging fashion. Once the projections, fantasy, and intensity of the honeymoon stage fades, we have the chance to glimpse the exquisite unconscious reasons that we have manifested this relationship at this time. Clearly intimate partnership is not meant to be conflict free nor led by ongoing romance. Try sharing a bathroom with a lover! Yet we are compelled to partner, to form deep and intimate attachments with obligations and contracts. Relationship is a powerful vehicle in the frontier of self-discovery and growth; to boldly go where we must if we are going to reclaim the lost parts of ourselves or confront the unhealed family legacy we have unwittingly inherited. Every relationship holds a gift even if the gift is to learn how to walk away. Ultimately each of us is meant to feel our life completely. Relationship is a primary means of breaking the heart open so that we may live with an open heart. We get hurt in relationship and it is in relationship that we heal. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/60fea57628d9fc76add22bc1/t/61046bf16b03452d07939f7d/1629239159302/unsplash-image-zwXuzFr3mLs.jpg Working With Me https://static1.squarespace.com/static/60fea57628d9fc76add22bc1/t/61046d1f3883fe4697caf977/1629235806232/unsplash-image-O9RZMEUUSpo.jpg Working With Me - Addiction Alcohol drugs and marijuana are not the enemies. No more so than food, sex, gaming or money. Yet for so many of us they become the vehicles of emotional avoidance and grow to destroy the matter and meaning in our lives. This is the essence of the prison of addiction. The Latin word “addictus” means “enslavement” and in the most important ways it is what often defines our relationship to cigarettes, cocaine, alcohol, opiates and/or any of the other myriad forms of “medications” available to all of us. If we use these substances as coping mechanisms to mask our true feelings, then we never learn what we truly need and we become enslaved by the substance and thus never attune to our wounded Self. The amount of energy required to live the cycle of addiction is enormous. It allows us to hold our breath against how we actually feel. This makes it possible to shame our sensitivity and to ignore how hard we’re working to hold it all “together”. Alternatively, the effort required to live consciously and spontaneously is usually far less but wholly unknown to us at the same time. It asks of us to know how we feel from moment to moment. Addiction therapy will help to develop the tools to breathe into the dark scary corners of life and to reclaim the lost parts of self and gain mastery of the depth of emotion needed in becoming whole. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/60fea57628d9fc76add22bc1/t/611c2b0781a3d621cd595153/1629935156530/unsplash-image-rWotMddrvUM.jpg Working With Me - Men’s Groups Men have very little, if any, modeling or support for honest, compassionate emotional guidance and confrontation. Often in relationship we lead with our logic mind, focus on “the problem,” and move “to fix.” We seldom, if ever, attend to the needs or wisdom of the emotional body. Then we find ourselves numb to our own feelings and needs and struggle to find deep companionship, intimac and vulnerability. Friendships are largely experienced based, often centered around activities, drug use, and surface connection and conversation. The result is a deep isolation and loneliness beneath a veneer of busyness and chatter. The medicine is safe exploration and processing of the feelings and needs of the true self in the presence of others invested in this quest. This is my wheel-house. I have facilitated and been part of men’s groups for over 15 years. There is no healing quite like it. To know beyond a shadow of a doubt that regardless of your story, your shame, and your overwhelm you are not alone prepares the Self for healing and growing in a profound way. To trust another man, to see where you feel insecure and to be entrusted to see that place in another invites you home inside yourself and heals the harm of shame. This is what I offer. https://www.jonathannadlman.com/media daily 0.75 2021-08-23