My Approach to Helping
At An Awakened Heart, Psychological Approaches to Mental Health Wellness, my goal is to work with others in ways that support one's inherent worth and value so as to facilitate self-understanding and self-acceptance. While building upon strengths that envelop a holistic psychotherapeutic approach, our work together purposefully focuses on bringing forth the individual from behind the "mask," that maintains and protects against the emotional pain we try to avoid rather than heal from.
Because we often deny who we truly are, rather than heal those parts "perceived" as damaged, we find ourselves repeating dysfunction, rather than transcending it. By nurturing the true authentic self, the work is to transform faced challenges, through the unmasking of faulty perceptions that sabotage a relationship to Self, and others.
Changed understanding begins the path forward toward a new way of being, breeding the existence of a more whole and integrated centered-self. This in essence allows for the development of a true Awakened Heart and mind.
My Role as a Therapist
My role as a therapist is to assist others within their search for true change. Within my own process, wherein I am able to love and accept myself, my desire is to work with others to uncover those answers for themselves as they connect with the deeper side of Self-understanding.
In my opinion, it's not "therapy" that brings about individual change, it's the therapist's held belief regarding how we chose to see others who seek our assistance. If you are truly able to see the person before you, you understand the value associated with their being, and through that value come to understand the worth associated with their significance. The significance lies with an individual as they currently are, as well as aspirations of becoming who they desire to be. The therapist then is really a tool utilized as a collaborative means toward one's ability toward Self-discovery and growth.
How My Own Struggles Made Me a Better Therapist
We are a collective. We are unified and connected to one another in spite of the individual nuance engendering individual experience. Within this humanness, our mirroring of experiences enables us to feel life's challenges and collaborate with descriptive values that translate to prescribed adversity, anguish, and despair at times. Because what we focus upon grows, remissed are the in-between spaces where peace, hopefulness, beauty, and love are also present. These differences or distances between are mere perceptions in consequence to the many ways we choose to label experiences, ourselves, and others. This creates and can maintain concepts that bring about mental distortion, self-imposed pain and lead to a personal and interpersonal disconnect. In perpetuating for ourselves and enacting with others what has been created in light of what is believed, WE not only reinforce but also look to Others to reinforce what becomes a personal truth. For example, if I believe myself to be a victim, then I AM a victim. This becomes manifests and self-fulfilled in the way I carry myself, interact with others and speak my narrative. In this way, I limit myself, my vision of what is possible, and... what I believe is possible for others. It is through this identification that I facilitate the persona, image, and role I often find myself in, and further, utilize as the means to seek and validate myself despite its dysfunction. When I was able to understand the patterns, themes, schemas that perpetuated my held identification(s) I noticed how limitations maintained me and SMALLNESS sustained me. The Trans-personal work that led me to discover MY-SELF, is what I offer to others, who are willing to see change as possible and wish to engage it.
