Counseling

Question

What do hope and change really mean? Are they just buzzwords, sound bites, or part of some hackneyed slogan used to entice or distract? Have they been weaponized against you or those you care about? Have they become meaningless in their overuse or near-constant contradiction to the actions that follow their espousement? Do the words hope and change just feel like more lies one must uncover or constantly filter? I wish I could disagree, but I have experienced hope and change within such harmful context. However, what if we allow all that is negative connected to these two words just to be, and then choose, even if only for a moment, to imagine these words, the concepts they represent as we personally perceive them, in a pure, unsullied state?

Integrity

How I strive to be as a counselor for my clients is one who can hold the pure concepts of hope and change for my clients when they are experiencing challenges. To maintain my unwavering belief in our innate human capacity for change. To act as a reminder of one’s capability of experiencing hope and manifesting change, especially when we are at those junctures in our lives when such concepts seem incomprehensible.

Autonomy

I cannot heal my clients, I cannot fix or save them, but from a person-centered approach I can follow their lead as we explore who they are and why they think or feel or sense or intuit something or someone in their life the way they do. I view my clients as the experts on themselves, though another’s perspective, often from ‘distance’ can be helpful in obtaining deeper understanding of the self.

Safety

The manner in which my therapy is informed requires that I endeavor to create a space of safety and non-judgment in which clients can work with both the allowance of the existence of their challenging experiences and the acknowledgment of how these challenges affect the client’s past, present, and future being.

Advocacy

It is important to me to honor my clients in all that they are by choice or circumstance, to honor all parts of a client’s identity, culture, total being. I embrace the concepts surrounding multiculturally-informed therapeutic practice and endeavor to extend them further to include sub-cultural groups and clients’ personal relationships. A key component to thriving is acceptance by self and others of who we are in all our imperfection. I seek to maintain personal acceptance of my clients at all times while I continue to try to offer such acceptance to myself.

Style

Never above clichés, sarcasm, and bad jokes (as appropriate, of course), I attempt to approach my clients from a vantage of our each being equally human parts coming together with different roles and responsibilities within the therapeutic relationship. Teaching is very much a part of my ‘style’ as a therapist, and I include cognitive behavioral techniques to help clients during times when a more directive framework in which to explore themselves is beneficial. I offer inner-child work for clients experiencing the fallout from past trauma, working to increase a client’s understanding of the ‘whys’ of their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in order to better manage their present life from a more informed perspective.

Grace

I am imperfect. I am broken. I am far from the person I endeavor to become. I know I have the potential to be so much more than I am, but also that knowing this can be as much a burden as it is a gift. Taking time to be both self-focused and to establish clear and flexible boundaries can assist in creating a more grace-informed life. When we can find our own ways to offer ourselves grace it allows such grace to flow through us and become available to others in our lives. I wish to act as an example to my clients that the journey of self discovery and life management is never going to be about arriving at a destination, but that does not mean we cannot celebrate all our accomplishments, no matter how small, along the way.

Collaboration

It is challenging just being in this world. That challenge can feel insurmountable, especially when we try to manage our world alone. In isolation the world becomes a much more brutal place to be in and can cause smaller issues to fester and become so much more daunting to address. Through the therapeutic relationship I offer my clients, I endeavor to support them as they discover how to better manage their lives, that it is okay not to do everything on our own, and that asking for and being open to receiving help is an act of profound courage and true resilience.

Therapy is not for the timid, but don’t worry, you’re not in this alone.