Jean Austin-Danner, Clinical Social Worker in Orlando, 32835

Jean Austin-Danner, MSW, LCSW

Profession(s):
Clinical Social Work, Psychotherapy, Marriage & Family Therapy
License Status:
I'm a licensed professional.
Primary License:
LCSW - SW5444

My Approach to Helping

Are you often sad, worried, frustrated, uninspired, insecure? Are your relationships just not how you want them to be? Do you have some significant life changes that are throwing you for a loop? These are the kinds of issues I am especially interested in helping people address.

As a therapist, I do all that I can to provide a safe place for you, my client, to speak about the things you would not feel comfortable discussing with anyone else in your life. This process can help you develop a sense of clarity and purpose.

I am "on your side". This means that I will give you honest, respectful feedback about what I see as both beneficial and problematic behaviors or approaches in your life and relationships. This can help you build a realistic sense of yourself and your impact on others. This can contribute to a solid sense of self-esteem. I can also help you identify what in your environment may need to be changed to support personal and relational happiness.

Developing clarity and purpose, and learning to genuinely accept and respect yourself, are some of the best resources you can develop for dealing with life challenges.

Please refer to my website for a lot more information about my scope of practice and my therapeutic approach.

More Info About My Practice

I am an approved provider for Cigna. I can also provide EAP services for Disney employees.

I believe knowing and effectively expressing our emotional responses to the events and experiences of our lives is a crucial aspect of healthy living and good interpersonal functioning.

I am very receptive to discussions about meaning-of-life, death, and spirituality, if a client is so inclined.

How Psychotherapy Can Help

I believe people develop a lot of their sense of identity & value through relationships, especially the initial parent-child connections. No parent is perfect, and neither are their interactions. So, children often develop some distorted understandings about themselves through such communications. We bring these distortions with us into later relationships, or into our work environment. This can results in problems. Therapy offers a relationship that can help reshape some of those distortions. It's not that therapists aren't also imperfect humans!, but we also have education in psychological, developmental and interpersonal theories and research that help us work our way around some of that.

In addition to using those kinds of skills with clients, I also believe much emotional healing comes from genuine human-to-human interaction. I am very real with my clients. I am a person, just like all my clients, with my own history. I have been in my own counseling process. I rely on the wisdom of my own experience, too, in counseling.

I love therapy because it is satisfying to watch people discover new understandings that really bring about meaningful change in their lives. I also love to provide a place for people to talk about the things they would never feel free to discuss anywhere else.

Past hurts can leave us feeling despairing. Therapy can instill a sense of hope, and help people make sense of situations that feel senseless.

Why Going to Therapy Does Not Mean You are Weak or Flawed

I actually do not spend a lot of time or energy trying to challenge this stigma. If people want to believe this, that is certainly their right.
I would suggest, however, that our beliefs are not always OUR beliefs. Sometimes it is a good thing to push ourselves out of our comfort zone a bit to find out what we really believe.
I have a great deal of respect for people who are willing to acknowledge they have some kind of problem and are also willing to reach out and access resources, including therapy, to deal with it. This just seems courageous and smart to me.
I understand the concept that acknowledging flaws makes us weak. I was raised with that belief. I have come to see that, often, such a belief is not really a belief, but a manifestation of fear. I have also discovered that such a belief is often associated with another belief--that we are all in competition with each other. Of course, then, you don't want to 'show your cards' by being honest, real or genuine. I think that worldview doesn't really work for people, however. We are all most certainly flawed. We each have our limitations. This suggests that a compassionate attitude would be more fitting. In a compassionate context, the idea of flaw and weakness becomes irrelevant.