Focus
Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.
–Carl Jung
My focus as a relational and existential-humanistic psychotherapist is to walk the path of healing into wholeness with my client. It is my honor and privilege to be a companion and a guide to whomever decides to take the chance to venture on this journey to self-transformation.
The pathways on this journey will be complex, multilayered, circular and even mysteriously numinous. There are several aspects to my healing philosophy that I would like to go over in this section.
The Therapeutic Relationship
The first and most important aspect is the quality of the therapeutic relationship. When functioning at its best, the therapeutic relationship will foster a corrective, secure and reliable attachment in which the client’s earlier childhood emotional injuries can be discovered, expressed and resolved within a safe and nurturing space.
This unique relationship encourages the emergence of traumatic, repressed and/or dissociated memories so that they might be consciously interpreted and integrated, thus reducing their deleterious neural and psychological impact. Over time, the therapeutic relationship gradually fosters the client’s development of a more mature and authentic sense of self who is able to relate to him/herself and others with greater intimacy, honesty and integrity.
The quality of my presence during a therapeutic session is one imbued with care, compassion and an unconditionally positive regard for my client. It is my belief that the client sitting across from me is already a beautifully whole person at his/her core, just a bit burdened and scarred by insults and afflictions that were imposed upon him/her by unfortunate external circumstances. My focus is to help my client remember and reintegrate discarded or forgotten parts of him/herself; parts my client walled off in an attempt to survive earlier assaults to his/her personhood.
Integrated Therapeutic Approaches
The revival of hope, meaning and aliveness, which is my ultimate goal in any therapeutic encounter, needs more than just the application of conceptual approaches to insight.
It has been my experience that intellectual knowledge and rational explanations are not enough by themselves to undo lifelong, entrenched patterns of thinking and feeling. Insight must be energized by emotions that wear flesh, bones, muscles and nerves in order to effect deep characterological changes that endure. I use breath work, guided visualizations and body access tools to tap into the wisdom of the body in helping my client on this journey of healing into wholeness. Our psychological, mental and emotional processes are simultaneously experienced within our somatic self as energy, sensation, tension, breath, posture, movement and gesture. Trauma, emotional pain, conflicts and characterological defense strategies are expressed in various somatic organizations such as chronic muscular contraction and physical armoring, shallow or irregular breathing, collapsed postures, rigid or agitated movements, and psychosomatic symptoms. Through mind-body connection exercises, my aim is to facilitate a more balanced flow of energy within my client’s embodied self. Our health and vitality is directly related to a healthy and balanced flow of energy throughout our whole system.
My overall focus as an integrated psychotherapist is to bring vitality, health and a sense of wholeness to my client. Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and freedom. It is my goal to create with my client an intimate choreography that supports the slow repair of psychological holes in his/her sense of self. It is my wish to support my client in creating, exploring and embodying that space between stimulus and response so that a greater sense of freedom and mastery is experienced.
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Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is. ~ Thomas Szasz
#serenity #boredom #innerpeace #calm #restored #healingintowholeness #healingtrauma #portlandtherapist

Boredom is the feeling that everything is a waste of time; serenity, that nothing is. ~ Thomas Szasz
#serenity #boredom #innerpeace #calm #restored #healingintowholeness #healingtrauma #portlandtherapist
“Fate is how your life unfolds when you let fear determine your choices. A path of destiny reveals itself to you, however, when you confront your fear and make conscious choices.”
Caroline Myss
#chooseyourpath #destiny #powertochoose #couragetoliveanauthenticlife #couragequotes #healingintowholeness #portlandtherapist

“Fate is how your life unfolds when you let fear determine your choices. A path of destiny reveals itself to you, however, when you confront your fear and make conscious choices.”
Caroline Myss
#chooseyourpath #destiny #powertochoose #couragetoliveanauthenticlife #couragequotes #healingintowholeness #portlandtherapist
“One thing I have learned with certainty is not to stand in connection with those who diminish me. This is particularly difficult when family is involved, because we have a vested interest in perpetuating the family system for all kinds of different reasons. I don’t believe one should endure abuse no matter how attached they are to an idea of family. There are many families waiting for us (read: soulpod) just outside our habitual awareness. We are not responsible for those who diminish us. We really have to get that. We can be compassionate and we can certainly understand where their abusiveness comes from, but understanding the origins does not mean we have to endure it. Its not our cross to bear.” Jeff Brown
#chosenfamily #boundaries #selfprotection#knowyourworth#healingintowholeness #healingtrauma #portlandtherapist

“One thing I have learned with certainty is not to stand in connection with those who diminish me. This is particularly difficult when family is involved, because we have a vested interest in perpetuating the family system for all kinds of different reasons. I don’t believe one should endure abuse no matter how attached they are to an idea of family. There are many families waiting for us (read: soulpod) just outside our habitual awareness. We are not responsible for those who diminish us. We really have to get that. We can be compassionate and we can certainly understand where their abusiveness comes from, but understanding the origins does not mean we have to endure it. Its not our cross to bear.” Jeff Brown
#chosenfamily #boundaries #selfprotection#knowyourworth#healingintowholeness #healingtrauma #portlandtherapist
I counted my years and found that I have less time to live from here on than I have lived up to now.
I feel like that child who won a packet of sweets: he ate the first with pleasure, but when he realized that there were few left, he began to enjoy them intensely.
I no longer have time for endless meetings where statutes, rules, procedures and internal regulations are discussed, knowing that nothing will be achieved.
I no longer have time to support the absurd people who, despite their chronological age, haven`t grown up.
My time is too short:
I want the essence,
my soul is in a hurry.
I don`t have many sweets
in the package anymore.
I want to live next to human people,
very human,
who know how to laugh at their mistakes,
and who are not inflated by their triumphs,
and who take on their responsibilities.
Thus human dignity is defended and we move towards truth and honesty.
It is the essential that makes life worth living.
I want to surround myself with people who know how to touch hearts, people who have been taught by the hard blows of life to grow with gentle touches of the soul.
Yes, I`m in a hurry, I`m in a hurry to live with the intensity that only maturity can give.
I don`t intend to waste any of the leftover sweets.
I am sure they will be delicious, much more than what I have eaten so far.
My goal is to reach the end satisfied
and at peace with my loved ones
and my conscience.
We have two lives.
And the second begins when you realize you only have one.
Mário Raul de Morais Andrade
Rehahn photography
#consciousaging #agingwell #livefully #weonlyhavenow #healingintowholeness #healingjourney #portlandtherapist

I counted my years and found that I have less time to live from here on than I have lived up to now.
I feel like that child who won a packet of sweets: he ate the first with pleasure, but when he realized that there were few left, he began to enjoy them intensely.
I no longer have time for endless meetings where statutes, rules, procedures and internal regulations are discussed, knowing that nothing will be achieved.
I no longer have time to support the absurd people who, despite their chronological age, haven`t grown up.
My time is too short:
I want the essence,
my soul is in a hurry.
I don`t have many sweets
in the package anymore.
I want to live next to human people,
very human,
who know how to laugh at their mistakes,
and who are not inflated by their triumphs,
and who take on their responsibilities.
Thus human dignity is defended and we move towards truth and honesty.
It is the essential that makes life worth living.
I want to surround myself with people who know how to touch hearts, people who have been taught by the hard blows of life to grow with gentle touches of the soul.
Yes, I`m in a hurry, I`m in a hurry to live with the intensity that only maturity can give.
I don`t intend to waste any of the leftover sweets.
I am sure they will be delicious, much more than what I have eaten so far.
My goal is to reach the end satisfied
and at peace with my loved ones
and my conscience.
We have two lives.
And the second begins when you realize you only have one.
Mário Raul de Morais Andrade
Rehahn photography
#consciousaging #agingwell #livefully #weonlyhavenow #healingintowholeness #healingjourney #portlandtherapist