Individual Counseling
Individual Counseling can address a wide range of concerns from needing simple advice and support during transitions in vocation or times of family stress to more challenging situations stemming from difficult painful or traumatic experiences. Counseling may involve psychotherapy for disorders of mood or thought or it may focus on developing the expressive tools needed for improving communications at home, at school, or at work. Almost everyone, regardless of diagnosis or life situation, will encounter times of stress and periods of depression and/or anxiety; it’s just part of the human condition. Counseling can help with this.
All of the goals for individual counseling are determined by the needs and desires of the client in collaboration with input from a skilled therapist. Our mission is to work with you to create an atmosphere of trust, to furnish you with the tools and support needed to make key discoveries that will, in turn, allow you to experience a more deeply meaningful, creative, and satisfying life. We provide individual counseling in a manner designed to honor and respect the concerns of persons of any age, gender, race, political persuasion, sexual or religious orientation. If you have any specific concerns, please feel free to inquire.
Couples
Counseling
Couples counseling is always appropriate for people who want to grow and deepen their loving relationships. It’s something healthy people do when they care about enriching their life together. You don’t have to have a problem to see a therapist for marriage or relationship counseling. If you want to enhance your communications or deepen your intimacy, several sessions with an experienced counselor can provide wonderful benefits in a shorter time than the same efforts might afford over a longer period working on your own. There is no set ideal for healthy relationships that can be applied in a one-size-fits-all approach, but with a little time and patient work, a more truly unique and more deeply satisfying relationship is often possible for those who make the effort. For couples with children this process may also involve counseling related to parenting and family therapy.
Couples counseling is also appropriate for lovers in conflict or spouses wondering how to adjust to painful events like the loss of a child or an infidelity. Whenever two people are considering a major decision like the decision to marry, to have or not have children, to ask for a separation or to file for divorce, counseling is a wise way to move forward. The process involves discussing worries and concerns, sharing hopes, fears, and expectations, as well as disappointments and pain in order to work through family issues and conflicting values while preserving personal identity and emotional safety. While difficult times are never easy to handle, they need not destroy everything we love and value. There is always hope for growth and healing and for moving on in life constructively if we are willing and open to learning those new skills of communication and interaction that make for new and better outcomes. Family therapy may also be needed for those couples with children, as all the relationships in the home are influenced and impacted by the quality of the couple’s relationship.
Parenting & Family Therapy
The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults. – Peter De Vries
Parenting is a rewarding, life-changing gift and can be a profoundly demanding one as it requires plenty of selfless growth and giving in return. “Mother” or “father” is sometimes a role we assume without any clear idea as to its true requirements and best practices. Most of us tend to call on our own childhood memories, either to replicate or repudiate what was done to us in our own rearing by how we raise our children. This tends to meet with mixed success, especially since no two children have ever been born alike and no two parents were ever raised in just the same way. So what to do when difficulty arises? Parenting classes & family therapy are a good way to find the support and advice needed to make effective progress. This is just as true for “healthy families” with “normal kids” as it is for the rest of us. In fact, “healthy” and “normal” are problematic terms in that most people in families quite “healthy” and “normal” seriously doubt it from time to time and many people in seriously “unhealthy and abnormal” families tend to think everything’s fine and they are normal. So if we start with the notion that every child is unique we quickly come to realize that every family’s health and normalcy may also be unique within a few obvious and important parameters. On the other hand, any family with a private history that includes acts of aggressive verbal or physical assault, violent punishments, ritual ridicule or abandonment, or sexual abuse is not healthy, even if it is sadly normal. It is important to move quickly in such cases to immediately interrupt all patterns of violence or abuse and to follow up with therapy for the trauma involved. It is also crucial to establish appropriate parental training methods and safe boundaries for family communication and child rearing.
We approach every family in therapy as a unique cooperative system in which each family member has learned unconsciously to assume particular roles and fulfill the responsibilities in those roles so that the family and its members may survive perceived threats or difficulties. Initially our performance works to lower family tension and helps us avoid a variety of painful consequences. Over time, however, our dutiful performance fails to work as effectively and the roles once meant to protect and defend the family, begin to become confining cages, preventing the personal growth and genuine communication so vital to loving family relationships. In therapy, each family member begins to discover a more genuine perspective and learns to speak with a more authentic voice, seeing past the roles they’ve played to the persons they love. Effective family communication is a skill that can be learned and, when applied with care and consistency, it can change almost everything for the family that learns to use it.
Child & Adolescent Services
Children need special care when it comes to therapy as their needs and abilities differ significantly from adult clients. We treat children with a variety of concerns ranging from anxiety and attachment issues, oppositional defiance, attention deficit disorder, mood disorders, and stress disorders related to traumatic events such a physical injury or illness, exposure to violence, or as a result of being the victim of verbal, physical, or sexual abuse. These concerns are compounded by the ongoing process of physical and psychological development which can complicate diagnosis and treatment. Younger children are less capable of the kind of abstract reasoning that informs traditional talk therapy, so the preferred method of counseling is to work through the expressive modes of art and play therapy. As children get involved in the process of making a drawing or playing with toys in a sandtray, they relax and the process of symbolic communication takes over, allowing for the slow unfolding story of their concerns or their trauma narrative to emerge. The gradual titration of threatening material encountered in this externalized fashion allows the healing process to gain momentum. As they discuss their art and play with a trained therapist they begin to put words to emotions and learn to communicate more effectively with family members.
Children who have been the victims of abuse also a need help to restore appropriate levels of trust in authority figures as well as help in learning what safe behavior looks like and how to set appropriate personal boundaries. Severely traumatized children may have PTSD and require additional therapy to reduce related symptoms. Usually the family members must also consent to be involved in a child’s therapy if it is to be effective and lasting in its benefits. Learning how to communicate with clarity and compassion as a family will go a long way toward making recovery possible. Sometime, where parental abuse is the concern, children feel responsible for the harm done to them. Creating and supporting a clearer and more accurately delimited sense of responsibility for behavior will help to avoid the long range codependent damage carried by many adult survivors of child abuse.
Adolescents need special care… They are emerging adults, on one hand, with all the independence and eagerness for freedom of choice that most adults demand, and yet they have periods when they express a wish to escape the pressures of adult responsibilities, regressing toward the carefree and irresponsible behavior of childhood. They seem naive one moment and far too street smart the next. This can be a challenging time for parents as the natural urge in this period of life is away from the familiarity and family connection of childhood into the more withdrawn and private world of an emerging adult. It seems they’d rather talk to their friends than be with their family. This may be natural but it is no less difficult. We approach adolescent clients as young adults. We make them an active participant in choosing the goals for therapy and in measuring its success. We seek to discover the particular version of creativity each adolescent client prefers and strive to enlist that creative form of expression as a key component of therapy. This may involve journaling, poetry, songwriting, story making, collage, photography, movement or dance, drama, you name it. As they express themselves creatively they begin to address their worries, irritations, resentment, joys, and hopes. These become the basis for family therapy as each adolescent learns to negotiate and communicate at home, at school, and in the world. This expressive process form of therapy combined with Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Mindfulness practice is effective when combined with prescription medications (in some cases) for treating various kinds of depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation, cutting, oppositional defiance, obsessive-compulsive disorder, eating disorders and personality disorders that frequently afflict young adults just beginning to move out into the world.
Both child and adolescent services will inevitably involve some family therapy sessions. A special form of contract and release for services must be signed when treating legal minors.
Personal Development & Spiritual Growth
At the core of our approach to Creative Insight Counseling is the belief that we are all in a process of growing up, of becoming whole persons. This is not an automatic process though it does begin with and derive from forces at work within us, energies we mostly don’t recognize until they are revealed by some crisis or by the niggling sense of being dissatisfied with our lives or incomplete somehow, despite our various achievements. Carl Jung suggested that genuine encounters with the deeper self (soul) are often experienced by the conscious mind or ego as failure, crisis, or an upsetting of our plans, goals, and intentions. He contends that this deep part of us is always trying to make contact with conscious awareness by way of dreams, unusual synchronicities in daily life, and by the upsetting of our apple cart, so to speak with intrusions by people and circumstances we did not seek out and do not desire. The goal of these communications from soul to ego is to provoke movement in us by degrees into greater awareness. The sense of living a meaningful life arises when critical life choices and one’s conscious awareness are informed, and transformed by the concerns, purposes, and values arising out of the depths of the soul.
This journey is very much about living with integrity and accountability, not to some external authority, person, or ideology, but to the profound convictions rising out of our deepest soul. The only way to resist the tyranny of fate (being a victim of some external force) is to find and persistently follow our own unique calling… our truest pathway through the dark woods of life. This harrowing journey requires heroic honesty and courage, but represents the only meaningful way to live toward destiny. Just as no two thumbprints or snowflakes are identical, ours is not a path like any other. When we are on our true path all of nature resonates within us and we cannot help but feel profoundly thankful regardless of circumstance and deeply connected with compassion for the world around us.
Lest the terms soul and spirit tend to confuse, please understand that this is not about religion. Religion is a very personal and important concern for many including me, but one’s religious belief or lack of belief is not the focus of this form of consultation. Gender, politics, race, sexual orientations are all valid concerns but one’s status and/or beliefs about these concerns are not the subject of Personal Development & Spiritual Growth consultations. The subject IS about developing the ability to listen to your own soul, to respect what it tells you, and to learn to live in growing harmony with the truth you come to know.
Creative Consultation
As a practicing artist and professor of art for more than half of my life I have developed a deep appreciation for artists and how they approach studio practice and hold a great interest in the nature, requirements, and transformative power of the creative process. As an art professor and frequent show jurist I’ve had many opportunities to offer my critique of artwork by students and colleagues alike. The information that emerges from these encounters reflects on aspects of the materials and their use, the implications of compositional and conceptual constellations and the psychological, social, art historical, and cultural significance of the works and references in question. I have also enjoyed discussions bout the creative process and its significance in the lives of particular artists, living and dead. Artists have told me these encounters have proven rewarding and valuable to the development of their art.
I also work with artists suffering from creative block, helping them move through a stuck place toward greater fluency and productivity.
To schedule a creative consultation, contact me by phone. It usually involves two meetings, one to collect information and look at ongoing work and one to actually do the formal critique. Some artists will prefer more sessions and these are available by request. Once completed, the written transcript of the critique can be obtained. All of this is determined ahead of time when services are contracted.