Individual Therapy
Sometimes the pattern follows you.
Individual therapy gives you room to slow down, pay attention to what keeps happening, and understand yourself in a different way.
Not everything that hurts needs to be solved immediately. Sometimes it needs to be understood first.
IThe pattern
What keeps happening?
Most people can name it, more or less. Reacting harder than you meant to. Going cold when someone gets close. Pulling back exactly when you want to be reached. The same kind of relationship, arriving in a different person. Knowing what you’d rather do, and watching yourself do the other thing anyway.
A pattern like that almost always made sense once. It was a reasonable response to something — a way of handling a situation that needed handling. The trouble is that it kept running after the situation changed, and now it turns up in places it doesn’t fit.
Fighting a pattern head-on tends not to work; it has been practiced too long. The work is more about getting underneath it — understanding what it is for, and what it is still trying to protect — until it has less of a grip.
IIWhat we notice
The work starts with noticing.
Before anything changes, it helps to see the pattern clearly — not as a fault, but as something that has been doing a job.
What happens inside you
The feeling that arrives before the reaction — the thing you register a half-second before you have named it.
What happens between you and other people
The moves you make when you are close to someone: reaching, testing, holding back, bracing. How they tend to land, and what comes back.
What you learned to do to protect yourself
The strategies you built, often young, for managing feelings that were too much at the time. They were competent then. We look at where they still run now.
What you want to be different
Said plainly enough to work toward — not a whole new self, just a specific way of being that you would rather have.
IIIWhen it may help
You don’t need a perfect explanation to begin.
Individual therapy can be worth starting when you are:
- stuck in a pattern that keeps repeating
- finding relationships harder than you want them to be
- carrying grief or a loss
- dealing with anxiety or depression
- trying to understand reactions that feel hard to control
- working through something painful from the past
- wanting to understand yourself more deeply
- feeling disconnected — from other people, or from yourself
These are examples, not a checklist, and you don’t need a tidy reason. “Something keeps happening and I’d like to understand it” is enough.
IVRelationships
Sometimes individual work is about the relationships around you.
The practice is built mostly around couples work, and a lot of what brings people to individual therapy is relational too — how closeness feels, what happens in conflict, how easy or hard it is to let someone in, what you do with your own vulnerability.
How we relate to other people usually has something to do with what we learned, early on, about being close to someone in the first place. That is worth understanding on its own terms.
This stays individual work. We look at your side of it — your patterns, your history, what you want — rather than refereeing a relationship. When it is genuinely a two-person matter, that is couples therapy, or premarital therapy if a wedding is ahead, and it is a different room.
VThe approach
Pay attention to what happens.
The work here is grounded in the same two approaches described on the approach page — Emotionally Focused Therapy and AEDP. On the individual side, in practice, that means a few things stay fairly constant:
- noticing emotion as it comes up, rather than only discussing it afterward
- looking under the surface of a reaction to what is driving it
- staying with an experience that is easy to move away from, long enough to understand it
- tracking the relational patterns that repeat
- finding words for things that have been hard to put into words
- making room for a response other than the familiar one
When the work involves a specific painful memory or experience, EMDR may be part of it as well — Jacob is trained in it. It sits alongside the main approach, not in place of it.
VIIn session
Less performance. More attention.
Sessions are mostly conversation, but a particular kind — slower than usual, and more willing to stop on a moment that would normally get passed over.
A lot of it is curiosity: what happened just then, what that reminded you of, what you noticed while you said it. Some of it is following a thread from a present-day reaction back to where it started. Some of it is just having the time and attention to think something through out loud with someone listening closely.
It isn’t always comfortable, and it doesn’t always produce an answer in the session. What it tends to produce, over time, is a clearer picture — and more room to do something other than the automatic thing.
VIIInvestment
Individual therapy is $150 per session.
Private-pay / out-of-network.
- Individual therapy
- $150 per session
- Couples therapy
- $165 per session
- Premarital therapy
- $125 per session
VIIICommon questions
A few common questions.
Who is individual therapy for?
Individual therapy can be useful for people who feel stuck in recurring patterns, are struggling in relationships, are carrying grief or difficult experiences, or want a deeper understanding of themselves.
How much does individual therapy cost?
Individual therapy is $150 per session. Bussmann Therapy KC is private-pay and out-of-network.
Do you also work with couples?
Yes. Couples therapy is the primary focus of the practice.
Can individual therapy focus on relationships?
Yes. Individual work can include exploring patterns of closeness, conflict, distance, vulnerability, and connection.
What approaches do you use?
The practice is grounded in Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) and Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP). EMDR may also be incorporated when appropriate.
How do I get started?
Start by reaching out through the contact page. From there, we can determine whether the work is a good fit and what the next step should be.
Sometimes understanding where you are is the beginning of knowing where to go.
You don’t need to arrive with the right words. You can start with what’s happening.