About My Individual Counseling Style

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**As of November 15, I am available for one session for gender-affirming letters, but full for individual therapy. In the meantime, you can fill out my waitlist form, check out the Healing from Toxic Relationships resources, and/or find a therapist in my therapist collective, The Living Room. **​

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Hi! Let's talk about how we would work together! First and foremost, I tailor my approach to each client. I work with adolescents starting at age 13, and adults of all ages. Each session with each client can also look different, because we will always start with you and what you want to work on. But, that being said, I have some tools I use to give the process a bit of structure. 

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Consultation

In our free 15-minute consultation, we will briefly get to know each other. I will ask you to tell me what you want to work on, and I will make sure that I have the tools and expertise to help you. It is part of the American Counseling Association ethical code that I only work with clients who I have the knowledge and skills to help, and I think this also just feels right. So I will make sure that whatever you are working on is something that I know I can help with. If it is not, I will do my best to help you find the right therapist or type of healer for you. If I feel I can help you, we will talk more about what that looks like, and then discuss the paperwork and scheduling.

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Counseling Goals

In our first session, we will work together to establish a few of your goals. We will try and create measurements for some goals, such as lessening symptoms of anxiety, depression, or post traumatic stress disorder. For other goals, we might just write a goal such as, "process the relationship with this person," or "process the trauma and/or feelings of this event." Then if it feels right, we will create a few objectives underneath those goals. 

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Your Therapy

The goals will work to establish a loose structure for our counseling sessions. So, in each session thereafter the first one,    

I will ask you want you want to talk about, work on, or maybe just what's on your mind at the moment. As we discuss whatever it is, I will keep your goals in the back of my mind, so that I can keep us on topic. There may be times when what you want to discuss doesn't seem relevant to the topic, but if it is relevant to you, then I want to hear about it! I often see patterns in things to help connect them back, anyhow. So you don't need to worry about working on your goals, or planning what you want to talk about for the next session, or any of that. That's my job. :) Your job is just to show up and be present. :)

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Counseling Theories

 

I use a few different counseling theories, which I keep in the back of my mind, to help keep us moving in a forward direction with your progress. 

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Relational Therapy: 

In every single counseling book I read, it stated that the most proven part of therapy is the therapeutic relationship. This is key to relational therapy. A successful therapeutic relationship is genuine, honest, warm, and kind, trustworthy, and it provides a safe, open space for you to talk about anything you want. Within this trusting therapeutic relationship, we can model healthy communication, which can help you in your other relationships in your life.

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Existential Therapy: 

This approach helps people to look for meanings, patterns, and direction in lives. It helps guide questions such as, "Who am I?" and "Where do I want to go in my life?" It also provides a framework for noticing patterns in the moment. For example, if we are working together on anxiety, and I notice a thought pattern or behavior that seems to increase your anxiety, then I might call attention to this so we can examine it as it is currently happening.

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Feminist Theory:

This is a framework for all genders and gender expressions, which helps to analyze power structures. This can help us notice how general society affects our lives, which can also provide a lens to connect social justice and multicultural components to the therapeutic topic. 

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Narrative Therapy:

This is a set of techniques to help people rewrite their life stories. Often, when a person has experienced trauma, they initially examine their entire lives through that lens, and sometimes even with the lens of being a victim. Narrative therapy helps us to see that we are in fact survivors, and we have the power to view our lives the way feels best to us - not the way society tries to tell us. 

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Acceptance and Commitment Therapy:

There are several techniques that guide this therapy, though there are two I focus on the most. When making life decisions, we can often feel lost. If we focus on our values that are most important to us, that can provide direction in choosing our goals and making decisions in alignment with our values. The other area is mindfulness, which is also part of the next section.

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Somatic Techniques:

Symptoms of anxiety, depression, and post traumatic stress disorder can all affect our nervous systems. Somatic techniques provide tools to help you notice how you are feeling in your body. Learning to listen to sensations in our body can give us clues about how we are feeling and where those feelings might be coming from. They also include tools such as mindfulness and grounding, which connect us to the present moment. When we are feeling symptoms of depression, we are often somewhat connected to a thought from the past. When we are feeling symptoms of anxiety, we are often somewhat connected to a concern in the future. When we are feeling symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder, we are commingling events of the past to concerns of the future. Mindfulness and grounding techniques help bring us to the present and connect to the here and now. These can be used as needed to bring us out of thought spirals. Though, when we use them in an ongoing and regular basis, they can help us prevent the thought spirals from beginning, which translates to feeling just generally calmer overall. 

 

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So, what do you think? Would you like to meet for a consultation and see if we are a good fit? 

 

Individual counseling is $175 per 50-minute session, or I can bill to Aetna; sliding scale spots are full. If you have out-of-network mental health benefits through insurance companies other than Aetna, I can provide you superbills which you can submit to your insurance company to request reimbursement (I cannot guarantee this).  

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Click here to schedule a consultation! 

Click here to read more about me. 

Click here to check out the books I wrote.

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