Sunday, February 22, 2015

FAQ's (Day 1 of 30-day challenge I'm embarking on)

What do you do?
                I’m a counselor. I work with adults and the occasional older adolescent seeking support for mental health, emotional and personal transformation difficulties. I generally work with one person at a time, but also see couples or other numbers of intimately connected people together at times.

Do you take insurance?
                I don’t. And I likely won’t in the future either. I like being able to practice with as few pieces of red tape to deal with as possible. My focus is on individualized work that evolves organically between myself and my client. I do, however, offer my clients a nicely accessible sliding scale. It is important to me that my services not be part of the problem of mental health being a classist system. Everyone deserves to be able to seek support and find it.

What type of counseling do you do?
                My work with clients tends to be flavored like Jungian work, or it’s more modern equivalent of Archetypal/Depth work. I am interested in getting to the why’s of what’s going on. Usually that happens through playing with images seen in dreams and what books/movies/tv/ music/video games a client is drawn to. Together we face a client’s Shadow, their Inner Child, Masculine and Feminine, or Inner Parents, for example. We touch on issues of Soul through personal ritual and journeys of personal transformation.

Do you work with….(insert mental health concern of your choice here)?
                I have yet to find a diagnosis or label that I wouldn’t be willing to work with. The theoretical stance I come from is widely applicable. What I *don’t* do, however, is offer quick solutions for concrete/specific problems. If you’re looking for someone to give you quick tools to stop smoking or get past a phobia or communicate an important truth to your spouse, then I am likely not the counselor for you. I’d want to help you dive into what you are covering up with your addictive behavior, or what your specific phobia is telling you about your Soul life, or help you be more comfortable with owning and expressing your Truth in general.

What do you specialize in?
                The bottom line for me is always that the client is the expert in themselves. There are things that I very much enjoy working with and have developed a particular level of expertise in. For example, Gender. Many of my clients are unique in their expression of gender. They likely reject the binary of male/female, and I understand and agree with getting beyond that binary. Then there’s Shame. So many people feel that there’s something about them that is just unacceptable. They hide and deny and avoid sharing it with people, and it gets in the way of intimacy and confidence for them. Many times that Shame is centered around something related to Sexuality. For some it’s orientations other than straight. For others, it’s being into the world of BDSM, or being non-monogamous. They are deeply drawn to something other than what they see portrayed as the culturally approved lifestyle, and thus feel like they are flawed. Another specialty is dealing with wounds received through religion, or the search for one’s uniquely authentic spiritual path.

Want to know more? Call me and ask! 
www.alternaterootscounseling.com
303-522-8839

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