About Us…
It seems like the later years of our lives are even fuller than the early ones! We married each other late in life, after both of us had already spent many productive years raising families and tending to careers. On reflection, it is clear that our lives have always been a full mix of love and meaning, pain and disappointment, with the fun stuff so well blended with the difficult things that one could not dispense with anything hard to bear without losing something too dear to surrender. At the time we started talking we both acknowledged that we were looking for ways to live more creatively, more honestly, and more effectively with whatever time remains to us. By the time we married we both felt sure that our growing relationship was about more than just our own love and happiness, that we were drawn together to be a resource for others as well. We both feel most fulfilled when encouraging and nurturing the creativity, flexibility, and vision of those around us. We want to spend the rest of our time together tending to loving relationships and encouraging personal and spiritual growth.
About Our Practice…
Creative Insight Counseling & Consultation, LLC is a business formed by my wife and I for the purpose of providing a needed service that enhances creativity and mental health for those around us. While the immediate goal of the services we provide involves the reduction of suffering, the long-term goal is an enhanced realization of the full potential of our clients for creative and meaningful living and loving. Susan and I have taken a long and winding path to arrive at this moment. For both of us that journey has involved love and hope, joy and suffering, and lots of tender grace applied with generosity from those around us, encouraging and cheering us along.
Each of our clients is also on a life trek. It is our distinct privilege to come alongside for a while and bear witness to important life changes, taking note of the various thoughts and feelings that accompany difficult decisions. When we share helpful insights that lead to profound understandings, those comments are mostly derived from careful listening and observation, from being completely aware and in the moment with our clients as they communicate. We believe that this kind of compassionate attention and authentic engagement pave the way for the series of incremental insights that can spark life changing decisions, leading, in turn, to new, more effective forms of communication and behavior. We ultimately believe that each client has the potential to live a more meaningful life by making conscious decisions to live with honest integrity and creative courage. It is our desire to support that kind of transformation, to encourage more creative living and deeply committed loving.
Mark Anderson
Licensed Professional Counselor
In addition to counseling, Mark Anderson is also an an active artist and the Lassiter Professor of Art at Presbyterian College where he has taught since 1986. He holds an MFA from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and an MA in Professional Counseling from South University in Columbia, SC. He specializes in creativity training, jungian dreamwork, cognitive behavioral therapy, mindfulness and acceptance therapy, grief work, and marriage and family therapy. He has experience in treating trauma, anxiety, and depression as well as helping individuals working through mid-life or late-life transitions. He enjoys assisting couples and families learning to communicate more effectively. Mark also enjoys doing creative consultations and reflective critiques with artists and other creative individuals.
Mark has attended Haden Institute trainings for dreamwork and recently joined the International Association for the Study of Dreams. Last summer at the IASD conference in Virginia Beach he won Best of Show and People’s Choice awards for his dream related artwork.
Susan Anderson
Licensed Professional Counselor and Registered Art Therapist
Susan Anderson (Masters in Counseling and Expressive Therapy University of Louisville) is a board certified, registered art therapist (ATR-BC) and licensed professional counselor (LPC) in South Carolina. She moved to South Carolina in 2008 to begin work with the South Carolina Department of Mental Health for six years as a school based counselor and art therapist. Susan worked with children, adolescents and adults in the local clinic, and did crisis intervention work in the local hospital in addition to her work in the public schools. After leaving the department of mental health she was hired by Laurens County Schools for two years as a school based art therapist and trauma specialist under special funding via a federal grant. She has since transitioned to full time private practice in 2017. Susan is trained in cognitive behavioral therapy, crisis intervention, marriage and family therapy, and solution focused counseling, and expressive therapies such as art and play therapy. She is rostered to provide Trauma Focused Cognitive Behavior Therapy through Project Best in SC, and has been trained in a resiliency and social skills psychoeducation program called “Why Try”.
“Anyone who spends time with children understands that art and play are their natural languages. To witness these forms of expression, is to be able to understand what children can not verbalize with words. The most important ongoing education I get,” says Susan in reference to her current work in the public schools, “is from the children themselves and my most valid qualification is that I love what I do and the people with whom I am privileged to work. I am so happy to be part of a system that truly cares about the well being of the children and their families, one that promotes and encourages success and wholeness, hoping to develop and channel the inherent strengths each child possesses in a positive direction.”
