Professional Counselor Associate
MA, Professional Counselor Associate
Supervisor: Carly Henderson LPC
I help people navigate their stresses and anxieties in a new way.
Client Status
5036949348
Portland, 97212
Rate: $125
Provides free initial consultation
Provides telehealth services
Practicing Since: 2020
Languages: English
Does it feel like there's just too much on your plate? Has it felt that way for too long? When chronic stress follows you everywhere sometimes it feels like overwhelming, buzzing anxiety. Other times it can be a heavy weight where everything seems pointless. It's gone on too long and it's time for a change. Therapy can help, and I look forward to helping you find the insight and tools to live at ease.
Specialties
Contemplative psychotherapy is based on integrating the wisdom of the buddhist tradition with modern psychology. We emphasize the present moment experience and each client's inherent mental and emotional well-being, and help clients recognize this quality in themselves.
CBT is a potent tool for working with depression, anxiety and trauma. Its focus on the relationship between thoughts, feelings and actions can offer personal insights. Clients build awareness of their 'automatic thoughts' and use this to uncover 'core beliefs'. In these ways it can pair well with mindfulness practices of the buddhist tradition. CBT also offers effective tools for changing behavior
Mindfulness-based therapy can help reduce stress by training awareness. Focusing and moving awareness where you want it can help interrupt patterns of thought that lead to anxiety or depression. Mindfulness-based therapy can also go deeper and take that same awareness and point it at our inner world. With time it can reveal truths about ourselves that are transformative, and tune us into the subtle, often unnoticed tendencies in the mind and body.
Specialties
Personal growth starts with really understanding where we are, here and now. To make lasting change requires we know what is meaningful, doable and true for ourselves. Sometimes we are trying to grow to get away from a part of ourselves. Sustainable personal growth involves cultivating a friendly, even compassionate relationship with ourselves.
Trauma can be one event (Trauma) or many smaller events (traumas). It can show up as issues with mood, sleep, relationships, and much more. We each experience and respond to traumas in unique ways. My approach to working with trauma is informed by the lessons from EMDR, somatic experiencing, and mindfulness practices. What's important is working at a pace that meets you where you are at.
Anxiety is an expression of a nervous system that expects something bad to happen. For our ancestors, this might have come up briefly when confronted by a predator, and then resolve when they escaped (or didn't). Today, we live with lots of sources of abstract threat (what do my peers think of me? am I doing well enough at work/school?) and more immediate threat (is it safe to go outside my home?). Without tools to help the nervous system calm back down, all these stressors add up quick.
We don't normally think of depression and stress going together, but they can. Depression can be seen as a nervous system pushed past anxiety, shutting down because there is no escape from bad, unwanted, terrible things. These can be real things in your environment, or even thoughts or feelings. Feeling apathetic, uninterested in what used to be fun, and tired all make sense from this perspective. Luckily it is possible to retrain the nervous system to come back from this hopeless place.
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