About Counseling

Life challenges can become struggles.

Be seen and heard.

Be supported and guided.

Heal what is hurting.  Establish new, healthy practices and habits.  Build your skills and capacity to handle life’s unchangeable givens, while you work effectively on the things you can shift.

You may suffer from depression, anxiety, or other difficulties.

You might be struggling with food and body issues, or distressing habits.

Normal transitions, like a job change or an “empty nest” can be daunting— even overwhelming.  Big issues, like relationship stress, illness, divorce, job loss, losing a loved one, can weigh heavily, stealing our energy and derailing us.

Naturally, we react to distressing life events, hardship, or big changes— by trying to fix them.  Or, we deal with them in a very human way— by avoiding or resisting them, by numbing, distracting ourselves, or procrastination, for example.  But this usually makes things worse, over time.

I will support you in trying out and learning new and effective ways to move out of the struggle and shift your life in the direction you want.  Break through and free yourself.

The benefits of our counseling work include new tools and strategies, new insight and increased self-awareness, and the skills for personal change, healing, and growth.

How does it work?

• Counseling is a partnership, a process, and a support system.
• We meet on a regular basis to try out your best strategies and work on the painful challenges that you want to address.
• It’s about skills learning, practice, feedback and encouragement.
• You will gain an understanding of and overcome barriers to change.
• It takes personal commitment and showing up consistently, with openness and willingness.

What is the goal of counseling?

My goal in counseling is to help you build inner resources for skillful and transformative change.  The aim is to support your efforts in living the desired changes, right away—and for the long-term—to ensure they are lasting.

Counseling can mean many things:

• Stepping out of old thinking patterns, emotions, and related behavior, that have been causing distress and have been barriers to change.
• Healing trauma.
• Recovering from anxiety and depression.
• Getting connected to your deepest truths, to take actions aligned with what matters most.
• Becoming empowered to live a rich, full, meaningful life.
• Recognizing strengths and growing them.

We explore what’s not working.  I tailor counseling to help you build the skills to address issues, and learn to deal effectively with what cannot be changed.  You experience the positive results, small and large, in daily life.

Counseling is immensely practical and action-oriented.  You will experience insights, take powerful actions, and feel better about your life, from the first session.

Counseling also opens up thinking to consider previously unexplored possibilities, to find the best pathway to the life you envision.

Your new strategies, tools and skills will stay with you, after our counseling work is completed; you will come away with skills that have become second nature and a full toolkit that you will have, always.

We will meet in 60-minute sessions, as frequently as we agree.

Counseling FAQ’s

How do we meet?

I work with English-speaking people, by phone (and other platforms) at times that work well for the client, even when time zones are different.

What happens between sessions?

I’ll help you determine, or I can suggest, possible actions you can take or practice, to expand on the work done in each session.

In the next session we will circle back and make sure the practice was helpful.

Very important, too:  If one tool doesn’t work, we learn from this and try new approaches.  And we celebrate wins!

How is counseling different from coaching?  How are they similar?

Counseling’s focus is on problems in daily functioning, like depression or anxiety; or a client’s big, difficult situation, like loss and grief.  Clients are suffering in some way when they come to counseling.

So its purpose is to help them overcome a serious life problem, improve their functioning in a specific area or areas, heal from past trauma, recover from a loss, or deal with a mental illness.

Counseling serves a client well when they feel they are willing and ready to reach out for help, and they are open to trying new approaches and ideas.  Counseling has been shown to be highly effective in many, many studies.

Coaching, on the other hand, is geared to helping clients who are already functioning well, in general, and who want to address a particular challenge or area of low satisfaction in their life.

Both coaching and counseling, in their own ways, help the client to create powerful shifts in their life.  Both coaching and counseling build on the client’s strengths, teach new tools, and tap their strengths and personal resources.  The intended results of both counseling and coaching are to open new possibilities and help the client create greater life satisfaction.

The Focus of Counseling

People who seek counseling are confronting a deeply troubling and painful life situation.

They:

• May have an issue that is keeping them stuck in a way that hampers their day-to-day functioning.
• Want to cope better with a difficult relationship or other distressing situation and work toward resolving it.
• Might be seeking support when moving through a painful loss or stressful, major life change.
• Could be experiencing distress in one area of their life but feel stuck and unable to change it.

In counseling, we focus on changes the client wants to make.  Counseling amplifies and builds on what is going well for the client, too.  There is a big focus on skills development and moving forward at a pace that is right for the client.

About Counseling with Me

I am a licensed, trained, and experienced counselor.  I bring 10+ years of private practice experience, and before that, years of graduate training, an internship, and 3,000 supervised post-graduate hours of training and counseling.  Each year I complete professional continuing education courses.

I provide the deep listening that many clients tell me they have never experienced before.

I am attuned to the client in a way that allows me to detect subtle, underlying problems that may contribute to difficulty in overcoming a challenge or managing a situation.

I help the client to address issues, and properly advise them, if needed, on how and where to seek specialized help—this can and does happen sometimes.  Most often, counseling and specialized support (for example, from a medical doctor or a dietitian) work well together.

Counseling psychology is both an art and a science.  I work hard in both respects to provide the best counseling experience I can for my clients.

My assurance to you:  When you’re working with me, a licensed mental health professional, you can trust the process to be safe, confidential, sound, and ethical.

A personal note to you about counseling:

Now, more than ever in modern history, and more than we realize, we have the means to shape our lives—and the sciences of psychology, neuroscience, and other fields have provided the tools and how-to’s.  I bring these to our counseling work.