Licensed Clinical Social Worker
You don't need to get hijacked by old, unresolved wounds. Let's work together to get back to your own sense of empowerment and wellbeing.
Client Status
503.481.4067
4829 SE Steele St.
Suite 200
Portland, OR 97206
Rate: $110-$130
Provides free initial consultation
Provides telehealth services
Practicing Since: 2011
Languages: English
I work with people who wish for lasting relief from limiting feelings and self-beliefs. Your challenges tend to be relational -- stemming from old, long-standing expectations of others. So, living well mean developing flexibility in the habitual reactions and responses you developed way, way back. The best outcomes happen when we can get curious together about your sensations, thoughts, feelings, memories -- the subtle machinery of your experience and your range of choices.
Specialties
A thorough grasp of attachment theory is foundational to understand most forms of dysregulation or mental illness. I consider attachment patterns as I seek to tune in to each client's suffering. I also have training in attachment-based therapeutic techniques.
Hakomi is an approach to therapy that brings mindful attention to bodily experiences, and an experiment-based approach to insight and change. I have extensive training in Hakomi and tend to use some of its techniques in most of my sessions. I borrow from Hakomi an attitude of compassionate respect for each client's organic process, and a basic stance of seeking to follow and unfold that process.
'Mindfulness' as used in my training background means 'sustained, non-judgmental attention and self-study.' This kind of mindfulness is not meditation; it is a therapeutic technique applied explicitly to promote insight and relieve distress. Mindful observation of one's feelings, sensations, and reactions, is a part of many therapy sessions, and may be done eyes-open or eyes-closed, as a client's comfort allows.
Specialties
I can provide help understanding the impact of historical or complex trauma, including the vagal and brain systems it often affects, and help you develop ways to manage its effects on your nervous system.
We encounter many forms of grief in our lives. I have conducted bereavement groups for those who have lost loved ones. I am also attuned to the grief that accompanies a lost childhood (for instance, when a parent has major mental illness), or lost innocence (the sense of safety, for instance, that disappears due to abusive or chaotic upbringing).
A wide-spread problem in our society, the corrosive effects of poor self-worth, and shame in particular, limit our capacity for flexible thinking and the range of choices we perceive in many situations.
Depression and anxiety are often situational, but just as often they are rooted in a core experience of ourselves that has persisted a long time, and resists any efforts to think our way clear of them. The mindful and experiential techniques I utilize allow access to the deep, core experiences and beliefs that need to be changed so that we can feel different and live with renewed energy.
I have a particular interest in working with men to overcome the legacy of toxic masculinity and the persistent burden of shame that it engenders.
Adam Benjamin has not posted any group sessions.
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