Individual Counseling
Individual counseling offers a place to resolve present challenges and old wounds, be heard and understood, and explore your own life journey safely and confidentially. As one of my former clients put it, counseling is about becoming your own best friend.
In individual counseling we will work collaboratively to create a safe and healing therapeutic experience that will address your unique needs. We will discuss your goals in the first few sessions. Creating well-formed goals evolves from exploring the initial issues and challenges you come in with and assessing and inventorying your current resources and strengths.
Your vision of what you would like your life to look like is vital to this process. You may feel confused about what your goals are, where you are headed or what you want your life to look like. If this is the case, I will guide you through a process to clarify where you want be and strategize with you how to remove or surmount obstacles to getting there.
My therapeutic style uses a combination of traditional talk therapy and experiential therapy. Experiential therapy is a doorway into contacting the direct experience of our issues in our mind and body, and emotional body, using various techniques and exercises. In the session this may look like a role play, feeling deeply into your body, experimenting with posture or voice, or a guided relaxation or mindfulness exercise.
My therapeutic orientation is based on Mindfulness-based psychotherapy, which encourages you to look towards inner experience to guide outward action. I am influenced by Focusing, MBCT (Mindfulness-based Cognitive therapy) and the work of John Welwood. Your awareness of the felt sense of your issues is increased, looking to sensations and feelings in the body to guide your healing process. Often a spontaneous release and change occurs during this process.
I use various experiential techniques mainly drawn from Gestalt Therapy, Imago Therapy, and Solution-Focused Brief Therapy to move from the inward experience to the outward manifestation of what choices need to be made, and actions taken to use what has been discovered and make change occur. I also utilize EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), a body/mind technique designed for resource building and trauma resolution, to work with varying aspects of anxiety and depression, reach performance goals, and to heal traumatic experiences.
My clients report that the feelings and insights brought into awareness and embodied during these experiential exercises combined with our talk therapy sessions help them to make concrete and practical changes in their lives.
We will also work with specific skills, based on what issues you want to work on, to help you shift limiting emotional patterns, move out of areas of stuckness, and feel more in control of your feelings and your life.
3393 Iris Ave., Suite 206
Boulder, CO 80301
303.225.2700
email me