Clinical Approach

OVERVIEW
Children and adults alike confront challenges to healthy functioning and personal fulfillment. Dr. Pagano aims to create an empathic connection with his clients, working together to create a safe environment to facilitate exploration of emotions, needs and habitual ways of coping. By exploring early formative relationships and experiences, including traumas and losses, he guides people to develop a better understanding of how these habitual ways of coping came into being. This process lays the foundation for change, opening the way for clients to take new risks and actively achieve their goals.

Whether using play therapy with children or talk therapy with adults, he takes an engaged, collaborative and active approach to help clients achieve their objectives and resolve their problems. When treating children, he works closely with parents, and when indicated, schools, to help children thrive.

THEORETICAL ORIENTATION
Dr. Pagano integrates psychodynamic, attachment, trauma-informed, somatic experiencing, and mindfulness approaches in his work with clients.

Dr. Pagano has extensive training in both Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples and Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy. These models focus on exploring core emotions and needs, and through this process, understanding the role of early, formative attachment experiences that have led to unhealthy or negative processing and relationship patterns. Both models work towards developing more adaptive ways of functioning. Both models are particularly effective in helping clients process trauma and loss, and develop a sense of renewed strength and resilience through corrective emotional experiences.

With children, Dr. Pagano integrates psychodynamic play therapy, mindfulness, strength-based, and problem solving approaches. Together, these models promote emotional and social competence, improved parent-child interactions, and enhanced communication and problem-solving skills. He integrates parent coaching, helping parents to develop stronger bonds with their children, and to facilitate their child's optimal growth and development.

With couples, he draws upon Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) to help clients develop insight into maladaptive relational patterns and to help them develop healthier ways to express emotions and needs and to thrive in their relationships.

Dr. Pagano approaches each encounter with curiosity and compassion, with the goal of assisting his clients to develop these same qualities in relation to themselves and others. He believes that the therapeutic relationship provides an avenue for navigating personal and interpersonal change and growth, and he aims to provide a safe, supportive and encouraging environment to help facilitate enduring change.