Understanding the Analytical Style

Having worked in the engineering field for decades (and being married to an engineer), I appreciate the strengths that highly analytical people bring to the world. I also understand that skills at problem definition and problem solving don’t always translate into every area of life. Technical professionals often seek counseling for reasons like:

• Relationship and communication difficulties ("my spouse says I'm not emotionally present")

• Frustration with group dynamics, management decisions, or interacting with non-technical personnel

• Burnout

• Anxiety about performance or "imposter syndrome"

• Logic/emotion integration — learning to work with feelings, not around them

• Career transitions and major life decisions

• Career uncertainty due to AI advances

People with a cognitive style that makes them effective at complex technical work often find that spouses, family members, and co-workers may not share their approach to analysis and evaluation, or find it easy to communicate with them.

Reservations About Counseling

I also understand why counseling may seem too focused on emotional processing and discussion to be helpful. Counseling and therapy can have a reputation of solely aiming to force overwhelming emotions and memories out of us.

While strong emotions can certainly arise and are welcome in the counseling process, counseling can also be seen as involving problem definition, goal setting, prioritization, hypothesis generation, data collection, feedback, process improvement, and reverse engineering. Engaging in those activities in my engineering career taught me much that I have found useful in both counseling and personal relationships.

My Approach and Style

My counseling approach aims at recognizing what style of information processing and problem-handling is most comfortable for each individual, and supporting them in using their personal strengths and traits to find the best solutions for them and their relationships. This means that while one person may benefit most from exploring their emotions in depth, others may benefit more from developing an abstract model of factors affecting their lives or relationships and identifying what adjustments would best suit their environment and situation.

Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) is one of the primary treatment approaches I use. It very much focuses on and utilizes goals, experiments, data, and feedback. In working with couples and families, I also use a Family Systems approach that is based on cybernetics and communications theory.

My own cognitive style is very balanced between emotions and analytical thinking. I bring both styles into the counseling process. This helps me to work with clients who wish to understand their style of handling situations, expand their repertoire, or communicate and problem-solve more effectively with a partner who sees and processes situations differently.