My Approach to Helping
My approach to helping clients comes from my Christian beliefs on how people should be treated. I take a collaborative approach to help them decide on appropriate and realistic goals for themselves and give them guidance and ideas to help them reach those goals. I challenge faulty thinking patterns and provide positive alternatives. I believe in engaging with my clients and developing a good therapeutic relationship so that their experience of counseling is a positive one. Many people come into counseling expecting me to "fix" them or their problems. I cannot "fix" things. I can help to guide, support, and encourage my clients. It is up to each person to put newly learned skills in place to make changes in their lives. I do give outside homework assignments, use journaling, bibliotherapy, worksheets, etc to help with making changes more quickly. I also help in connecting and/or setting up community resources if a client needs help with finances, housing, etc.
Specific Issue(s) I'm Skilled at Helping With
Over the years, I have worked with many people on a variety of issues. I started out working with children and adolescents with behavioral or mental health issues. I am good at helping parents and children developing new skills and ways of relating to one another to make their relationship and the household better. I have done much work on parenting skills and helping parents change their own behaviors in order to help their children. For the last seven years, I have spent most of my counseling time working with individuals/couples on depression and anxiety, affairs, sex addictions, pornography addictions, marriage issues, etc.
How My Own Struggles Made Me a Better Therapist
As a human being, we all have struggles or larger problematic patterns of behavior, myself included. I have thought about my own struggles over the course of my life and taken what I have learned about myself and other people and used that to help my clients. I believe that the things I have learned have helped me to be less judgmental and critical and more accepting, forgiving, validating, undertsanding, etc than I would have been if I had never dealt with my own issues. I even use my own struggles as examples with my clients, when appropriate, to help them see that they can do things differently, be a more positive person on the other side of it, and know that they are not alone in their issues. I use my past as a way to strengthen, encourage, support, and give hope to my clients.
Clinicians who offer sliding scale payment structures may offer lower or reduced fees based on an individual's ability to pay. Please contact this clinician for more details regarding their fees or sliding scale policy.