Your Initial Visit
Your decision to call for an appointment marks the beginning of your counseling experience. Asking for support or guidance is often the most difficult step. Many of us believe that we ought to be able to handle our problems alone and that asking for help is an admission of personal failure. Ironically, that belief can be a major barrier to resolving our issues. Asking for and using help is a necessary trait for successful people in our complex society.
In your first session, your therapist will help you to identify and clarify your concerns, identify barriers, and plan ways to move beyond them. You will probably find relief in your first session just through talking about your concerns. At the conclusion of your first session, you and your therapist will have clearly identified your counseling goals and developed an initial strategy or pathway for your work.
Individual
People contact our office, frequently being referred by a friend, relative, sponsor, employer, minister, medical professional or insurance provider. People come, as a result of something not working in their lives or wanting something more. They’ve done the best they’ve known how to do but their pain or frustration has persisted and maybe even gotten worse. They need help. It usually takes a good deal of courage to reach out. The most common concerns are anxiety, depression, addiction, relapse, marital difficulties, grief and loss, professional struggles, or an overall feeling of emptiness or loss of passion and purpose.
People may wish to do short-term work, seeking relief from a particular symptom or problem. Most of our clients feel relief within the first few sessions. Others might wish to do deeper work, which looks at the core issues that can drive and maintain the surface symptoms. Individuals doing the deeper work have typically found greater relief and fulfillment over a broader set of issues and goals.
Couples Therapy
If the initial reason you seek therapy involves your relationship with a spouse or partner, you may elect to do couples therapy. In this process, your therapist will seek to understand each person’s concerns, current coping mechanisms, communication patterns and ways you have tried to resolve your issues. Your therapist will also look at historic patterns and seek to learn the deeper needs of each of you and then support you as a couple to establish new patterns of relating.
Your therapist will initially examine the struggles in your relationship and then develop a vision with you for your future relationship. When a breach of trust has occurred, the couple will work to heal the breach and over time, re-establish trust.
Growth Groups
Our Growth Groups are very lively, educational, experiential, and transformative. Clients in our growth groups begin with a set of goals and over time, complete those goals. They work on current life issues. They also take on and master a specially designed set of assignments which lead them through core skill development, identification of guiding beliefs, resolution of original family pain, pathways to belonging, and integration of leadership skills. These groups have proven to be life changing for our clients.
How To Get The Most Out Of Your Growthwork Group
In this group, our clients learn basic skills which help them to put words to their own experiences. They learn feeling identification and come to understand the difference between their wants and needs and how to follow up those needs with direct requests. Clients also learn the skills of listening and supporting versus fixing in their relationships. And they learn to stay with themselves instead of losing themselves while engaging with another person. They get introduced to their own core beliefs and understand how those beliefs guide their choices and interactions in life.
Breathwork Groups
Educational Groups
Clinical Supervision Group
Based on the belief that in order to change, people need to connect with their feelings and that in order for them to connect with their feelings, they need to breathe, we offer ongoing Breathwork Group meetings where individuals learn to do diaphragmatic breathing. This type of breathing has proven to be very helpful in the identification, expression, and even resolution of deep seated pain and trauma.
Our Educational Groups provide our clients with information and experiences which broaden their skill-set and knowledge about themselves. We offer topics such as: Understanding Your Core Beliefs; Family Systems; Food Addiction Recovery; Understanding Your Personality Style; The Five Love Languages For Anyone; Money Matters; Relapse Prevention Planning With Addiction. Our Educational Groups are provided by local speakers in the room as well as by national speakers who are remote through teleconferencing.
Our Clinical Supervision Groups offer fellow coaches and therapists an opportunity to learn new skills, share successes and struggles in their professional work, develop greater awareness about themselves as helpers while witnessing their own interpersonal style with other coaches.
