CHRISTOPHER SKEAFF, LCSW, PhD (he/him)
Associate
Psychotherapy, as I see it, can help people to free themselves from restrictive or damaging habits of thought, feeling, and behavior. Just as important, it can enable them to experiment with new ways of being and relating.
I work with individuals and couples on a range of issues, including anxiety, depression, relationship difficulties, grief, trauma, and life transitions.
Drawing on 20 years of experience in higher education, I also have specific expertise helping individuals navigate the stresses of college, graduate and professional school, and faculty life.
How do you approach therapy?
I aim to provide a setting where clients feel safe, supported, and invited to talk about what matters most to them. As I listen, I try to get to know each client on their own terms. Together we explore possibilities they envision for their lives – at work, at school, at play, or in love—and we reckon with inhibitions and obstacles they encounter.
Each treatment is unique, but some of the common benefits include greater emotional resilience, deeper self-understanding, more satisfying relationships, and fuller personal and professional creativity.
What kinds of challenges do people usually bring to you?
I work with individuals and couples on a range of issues, including anxiety, depression, relationship difficulties, grief, trauma, and life transitions.
Drawing on 20 years of experience in higher education, I also have specific expertise helping individuals navigate the stresses of college, graduate and professional school, and faculty life.
What drew you to this work?
In my previous career as an academic political theorist, I took a keen interest in processes of formation and change, especially the dynamic interplay between the macro level of society and the micro level of the psyche. I was also drawn to the way political theory as a field treats big, important problems from a variety of critical and historical perspectives, particularly the question of freedom—its meanings, manifestations, and conditions. That critical-historical approach fueled my curiosity about the unthought features of our inherited political languages and practices.
In the field of psychoanalysis, I found a similar attention to the unthought dimensions of experience, of the strangeness in the familiar or the otherness in ourselves. Psychoanalytic therapy also offers a unique approach to the question of freedom in that it can help people to free themselves from restrictive or damaging habits of thought, feeling, and behavior. Beyond that prospect, it can offer them an experimental space to create new ways of being and relating.
How does your clinical training help you support your clients?
I earned my master's degree in Social Work from Loyola University Chicago, a certificate in the Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Thought from the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute, and a certificate in Integrative Psychoanalytic Couple Therapy from the Institute for Clinical Social Work.
From this training, I have developed a clinical style that combines systemic, psychoanalytic, and experiential components. Here’s a snapshot from my work with couples. We often start the treatment by identifying some of the system-level patterns that the partners are up against—the recurring “dances” they get stuck in—before moving to explore some of the sensitivities each person is bringing to the dynamic, their respective hopes and fears, etc., and how those sensitivities interact for better and worse. While attending closely to these systemic and psychoanalytic components of the treatment, it then becomes a matter of experimenting in session with new ways of engaging one another so that a couple builds their capacity to shift into more collaborative modes of relating.
Currently accepting new clients.