Counseling
Individual, couples, family, and group counseling.
I offer:
- Individual counseling
- Couples counseling
- Family counseling
- Group counseling
- Spiritual counseling and direction
While I counsel and coach people with various issues, I do lots of work with relationships, abuse, bullying, developing a strong and healthy sense of self, sex and gender, spirituality.
Because of my own experiences with loss and the survival of the soul, I also do lots of grief and hope work over the loss of our beloved animals and people. I am fully supportive of various orientations and paths to fulfillment. I want you to find your true self, not something imposed from the outside.
Typically, counseling delves into the past in order to help individuals, couples, families, and groups come to a better understanding of where they are now and solutions that help them make the progress necessary to live a happier, more satisfying, life.
Flopsy chasing Flopsy chasing action figure
Spiritual counseling and direction places a strong emphasis upon spirituality. I do not force any kind of belief system on you. Dogmatic approaches might work for awhile, but life often throws us curve balls that force us to move out of our rigid belief systems. People must develop their own spiritual sense, one that enhances life. Whether I work with you as an individual or in some sort of group, I take a systems approach. I often talk about owning the Shadow Side of ourselves. We must become aware of our darker impulses and own them, so they do not drive us. To make true progress, we must understand and involve various aspects of the system we find ourselves in. If we can get the rest of the system to make adjustments along with us, we are more likely to make lasting changes.
In all my counseling I take a holistic approach, having studied and experienced a wide range of healing modalities. Your mind, body, and spirit are important components of a good life. My intuition is every bit as important in helping you as my rational mind. So is yours, so I encourage you to embrace both aspects of your psyche.
Because of decades of experience, as well as formal counseling training, I will employ a number of techniques to help you. We may role play as ways to explore your situation and come up with possible solutions. I may assign journaling or other homework, such as recording your dreams so that we can talk about them and what they might signify. We may devise some rituals. I may ask you to draw for me or make some kind of art or music. I might tell you a story that relates on several levels to your own situation. As a literary scholar and writer, I know many. We may do some energy balancing and unblocking work, centering on chakras.
My dogs have often worked with me as therapy dogs–more rightly, as co-therapists. They have pointed out things I might have missed on my own.
You can read about my counseling and my first co-therapist Afghan hound, Baltho, or Balthazar, in my popular memoir, Baltho, The Dog Who Owned a Man, available directly from me (signed), as well as local bookstores and Amazon.com, among others venues. (Click here).
After Baltho, these animals served as co-therapists, Blake, the toy poodle, PoosPoos, the cat that thinks he’s a dog, and Hattie, the Afghan (with a haircut). In personality and looks Hattie was very much like Baltho. All have been rescues. Unfortunately I lost Hattie to cancer in August of 2011, and Blake to a car in March of 2011. He was overjoyed that Hattie had recovered so well from her cancer surgery that he ran across the street to help a neighbor get his dog back. We were all looking at the neighbor and his dog, unaware of what Blake was doing, till it was too late.
Poos is still here and doing well, joined by a rescued black angora kitten with cobalt blue eyes. Noir is now grown and 2 years old. His eyes have turned an intense green and his fur has a distinct mahogany cast. He is best friends with Melchior, my new co-therapist Afghan hound. Melchior is glad to help, just as Baltho did.