My Specialties and Counseling Style

I focus on spirituality and personal growth. The purpose of this page is to elaborate on this, give context for what foundations my counseling style is based around, and share the areas that I have found I most excel in. I do not wish to limit my clients to only people whose challenges fall under the areas on this page, but I do want to share more about where my starting point is, so that we can find better mutual ground to work from.

I like the psychology concept of developing a "therapeutic alliance," which to me means generally getting to know people better and establishing some form of healthy human relationship. I tend to start off working with people by asking what they want to get out of our collaboration, and see if I can get a feel for how they learn and connect the best.

All forms of interpersonal work rely on both people effectively working together to create results. You get back what you put in with regards to effort, willingness to explore, and humility to both teach and learn. I do my best to bring forth these attributes in myself, and they are necessary to some degree in both people in order to experience real progress.

Much of my work pulls from what I have learned through personal experiences, books, youtube videos, and meditation.

Two main foundations for me in my work are mindfulness, and exploring the strengths of my clients. My impression of mindfulness is that it is a key towards understanding ourselves and our emotions better, and to this end I try to involve skills such as self-reflection, introspection, living in the moment and feeling feelings in the moment, and slowing our experience of life down enough to have a better sense of what is going on beneath the surface for us. Exploring strengths is important because it gives us a foundation to work from, and from there we can either develop these strengths further, or explore how they can be applied to life challenges.

The specific issues or challenges that I have those most experience around are boundary issues, identity and self exploration (including Enneagram personality work), "life purpose" work, processing emotions or developing a healthier relationship with one's own emotions, depression, anxiety, and generally establishing a healthier relationship with one's self.

Hopefully this paints a clearer picture of what my work is like and what I'm good at.