What can you expect from counseling with us?
First, and foremost, you will be honored.
All that you bring, including the places in you that feel broken and are hurting, will be honored as sacred and in need of (and deserving of) kind and considerate care.
You will be INVITED to be known.
OUR BELIEF IS THAT COUNSELING SHOULD BE AN INVITATION INTO TRANSFORMATION VERSUS A DEMAND FOR TRANSFORMATION.
We will ask you to reflect upon who you are, but we will do so aware of what you need as you reflect, unearth and examine the soil of your heart. We will check in often around this.
We will honor you in this process of disclosing, revealing and changing at the pace that feels safe and attentive to you and your heart.
We will be honest with you when we notice things or are curious about things. Many clients express frustration with therapists who simply act like a “friend over coffee.” We will do more than repeat back what you said. We will honor that you have sought us out of desire for healing in some aspect in your life. We take that extremely seriously. First and foremost, our hope would be for you to feel safe and comfortable with us to share, and beyond that we will invite you to show up, to risk showing up, and to not only bring what you deem the “acceptable parts” of you to the counseling room.
We are also deeply committed to our own work, our own hearts and continued examining and deepening in our own lives…
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?
We do not come in the room as people only reciting some nice book knowledge or the newest research (we do that stuff too!). As therapists, we are committed to doing the hard work too. Yep, we are sojourners along this path of being a human.
We are committed to a deeply authentic exploration of our own hearts. We believe in the idea, that we first heard from Dan Allender, that we cannot go any further in your story than we are willing to go in our own stories. We know how challenging hard work is and so we do not invite you into hard places flippantly or carelessly. We do so because we believe redemption is possible and because we have experienced healing and redemption in broken places. We are excited about that. We want other people to know that feeling too.
"In the entire history of the universe, let alone in your own history, there has never been another day just like today, and there will never be another just like it again. Today is the point to which all your yesterdays have been leading since the hour of your birth. It is the point from which all your tomorrows will proceed until the hour of your death. If you were aware of how precious today is, you could hardly live through it. Unless you are aware of how precious it is, you can hardly be said to be living at all." -Frederick Buechner