Getting weak and vulnerable. It's a two-way street. (Day 8?)

It's fine to be weak and vulnerable. I believe this. It's normal. We all go there. Going there makes you human and real. So I'm going to practice what I preach.

Hi. My name is Heather. It's been 2 weeks since my last blog entry. I meant to do it for 30 days straight, and I got 7 in a row done before I lost my motivation and stopped. I'm embarrassed about that, but I'm also happy and proud of myself for doing 7 in a row like that. Usually it can be months between my blog entries. Am I ever going to be a daily blogger? Hell no! But I can push myself for bits of time and do more than I thought possible.

Even therapists have our struggles. A good counselor education program will include a requirement that budding therapists have their own counselor and do their own work. Working in this field brings up your own issues in a way that most people never get to know. They don't see the times where we are internally aghast at ourselves for counseling clients about the same issues we ourselves were working on in the very recent past. They don't feel the click of synchronicity that happens when a client shows up and needs exactly the advice you picked up in your recent continuing education reading. They don't feel the tremor of wonder and anxiety that can come from the awareness that we are being used by Something larger and greater than ourselves for the healing of another. A client comes in and tells you their vulnerability story about something that happened to them when they were younger that they never told anyone about before, and the thing is, you have been in spookily similar shoes in your own past, and now that experience is coming back to you while you're sitting there in session with them.

Over the course of 2 weeks, I lost more than half my clients. All for legitimate reasons, which I can fully be supportive of. A couple of those involved being financially hard up. That kind of thing is everywhere. People are sacrificing expenses that equal self-care all the time for the sake of meeting daily living expenses. It's a matter of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. When food and housing and transportation aren't possible, emotional healthcare and relationship building and self-actualization are just not within reach. Their suffering becomes my suffering, however, when they stop therapy and thus I can't make my ends meet. It's a weird world, and a weird place to be put in emotionally. But in the end, we pick ourselves back up, show up yet again, keep doing our work, and keep trying. And we find a deeper empathy for those we share the world with.

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

P Cubed

I am passionate about my profession. For a number of reasons, it is so much more than a job to me.

Personally – Counseling is something that challenges me to grow and deepen my self-awareness with each session that I sit in. I was taught that the greatest gift you can give your clients is to simply and wholeheartedly show up in the room with them. That is both a joy and a complication. When two people connect in an authentic and meaningful way, there are few things more beautiful or more powerful. Both parties leave the room different than they were when they arrived. What a delight it is to be working in a field where that kind of thing gets to happen on a regular basis! In my worldview and theoretical orientation, the counselor and their responses matters too. It’s not just about the client. A good therapeutic alliance is a two-way street. I firmly believe that the right clients show up in my office for the right reasons, for both of us. Counseling is a calling for me on a spiritual level. It’s part of why I am here in this lifetime. I get to talk to clients about their soul-health, discussing archetypes at work in their lives, helping them find ways to honor the inflection points in their path, watching them find that core of strength and personal power that we all have within us but is so easy to lose track of for so many. I have the humbling privilege of being the hand and voice of Source in those moments, a channel for Universal energy, a catalyst for people to reach the next level of Truth that they’ve been striving for.

Politically – I despise the fact that mental health has become known as something of a classist privilege. I understand why it is that way, and I intend my work to be a piece of what changes that. If you have the good fortune of working in a job that gives you an attractive benefits package, you may be able to see a Counselor under your insurance plan. But if you do, be prepared to be diagnosed with a label that may or may not fit you, so that your plan will cover you. And don’t be surprised if you only get enough sessions approved to count on your fingers. If these thoughts raise concerns about privacy and job security, you’re not alone. On the other hand, if you’re under-employed or unemployed, poor or working poor or indigent, you may be able to get emergency mental health services, especially if there’s a reason that you may be a threat to yourself or others, but the red tape will be enough to get lost in. But if you’re not living with that level of risk, if you have lingering concerns, or a desire to understand yourself and your situation more fully, good luck getting services. I’m designing my practice to avoid falling into that trap of being unwieldy and unavailable to those who need it and choose to seek me out. I’m avoiding insurance panels, at least for now, in favor of offering a sliding scale that makes my sessions on a financial par with your average co-pay for those who need it. Those who can afford more, can pay more, and make it easier for me to offer truly affordable care to the biggest range of people possible. Allowing for a portion of my time to be spent in pro bono work or volunteering for agencies that serve underserved populations is another thing that’s important to me. It angers me when I hear people say that Counselors are ‘in it for the money’. Do people who say that have the faintest clue what the average salary is for people in this field? Our country and our healthcare system does not value mental healthcare enough to throw anything but token attention and resources toward it. I could talk about gendered values here, and the patriarchy that governs so many decisions that get made still, and the assumption that a profession based on caring and healing and empathy is too squishy to be worth paying for. Or I could mention the student loan debt that many of us emerge into our professional life having to repay. To those who truly believe it’s about the money, I say you’ve either met some Counselors who have no business being in the field anymore, or you need to open your eyes and ask some intelligent questions about what constitutes success. I care so much more about the people I work with than I do the money they may or may not be paying me. And yet, professionals are worth paying, and paying well.

Professionally – A Counselor is not the same as a Social Worker, or a Psychologist, or even a Life Coach. There are areas of crossover, for sure, but they are unique roles. The focus of the Counseling profession is the therapeutic alliance between Counselor and Client. It is about the creation of a relationship where healing and personal growth thrive in an atmosphere of trust and openness. There are times when we talk with clients about community resources that could help them, or medications or treatments that are being developed in regards to their areas of struggle, or help a client set goals and make plans on how to reach them. But at the core of it, Counseling is a field about a person-to-person connection of a unique nature. When it’s good, it serves the purpose of helping each person find and optimize their own path and life. It holds a mirror up for people to see themselves more clearly and from angles that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to see. Just like no one can see the back of their head unless an extra mirror is held just right, a Counselor finds out the right spot each client needs their mirror held so that they can see things they’d miss otherwise. It’s a fulfilling moment, on all the levels mentioned here, when you and your client find that sweet spot, and their eyes open a little wider, and they have an ‘aha’ insight about themselves. You get to see their world and their sense of self get just that much richer and more complete. That is why I do what I do.