Counseling and Healing
Psychotherapy
Talking to somebody who is a neutral person in the sense that they have no agenda on how you should feel, think, or act is very healing in and of itself.
Putting your thoughts and feelings into words gets them out of the gerbil wheel of the mind, where they simply go round and round and round, leaving you exactly where you began except feeling more exhausted, demoralized, and discouraged. Who needs that?
Active Problem-Solving Therapy
You seek out a therapist because you hope he or she can help you solve problems that, up to this point, you have not been able to solve for yourself.
During our first session, I listen intently so that I feel I have a good sense of what the problem is, how it is manifesting in your life, and how to begin to resolve it. I am not one of those therapists who sits passively and says, “Uh hum, interesting, what do you think?” If you knew how to solve the problem, you wouldn’t be in my office! You came to me because I have knowledge, skills, and tools that will make a difference for you.
Empowering You with Practical Tools for Change
I believe strongly in empowering you, so I will teach you ways to work with a problem between sessions as well as during sessions.
How many times have you needed help with something when there was no therapist available, or you couldn’t afford to see one? I want you to have skills to use during these times. Some of the most exciting, innovative, and effective tools for change are deceptively simple. I can teach them to you in less than an hour, and as we practice them in my office, you will get immediate feedback and can feel the difference for yourself. Three of my favorites, Emotional Freedom Technique™ (EFT), Thought Field Therapy™ (TFT), and Tapas Acupressure Technique™ (TAT), fall under the heading of Energy Psychotherapy, which is discussed in that section.
Cord Cutting
Think about a cord as an invisible energy that connects you with another person. A cord may be gossamer thin, as when you smile at someone as you pass them on the street but never see them again and therefore easily dissolved, or substantial, built up over time as you are in a relationship with another over months or years, therefore not easily broken. Another example of a cord is a connection that has occurred because of a traumatic event, even though it may have been a one-time occurrence.
Cords are like conduits, carrying thoughts and emotions between two individuals. A common example is between parent and child, when a parent just knows that something is happening with their child without being told.
Cords can carry love, encouragement, and happy memories—in other words, many good things—but they can also carry and transmit negative energies. The purpose of a cord cutting is to eliminate the conduit if what is being transmitted is harmful. How do you know if it is harmful? Whenever you think of that person, you have a negative physical and/or emotional reaction, examples of which include such things as anger, fear, humiliation, fatigue, obsessive thoughts, hatred, confusion, love pain, and betrayal. You can see how these rob you of your happiness and peace of mind, sometimes even your health.
Cord cutting is easy yet profound. As the client, you are always in a safe and relaxed state of being while together we locate the cord. I energetically cut it, energetically bandage it so no further negative messages can come through it, and then “read” what messages have been flowing along the cord. We never, ever eliminate the positive. In fact, getting rid of the negatives that have been flowing through the cord increases your ability to experience the positive emotions, as they are no longer blocked or contaminated.
*You can read more about cord cutting in Cut Cords of Attachment by Rose Rosetree, (2007), Women’s Intuition Worldwide.
Energy Psychotherapy
Some of the newest treatment methods in mental health are taking advantage of knowledge from the fields of physics and Oriental medicine.
Quantum physics states that everything is energy, and that focused thought and attention can influence matter. From acupuncture, we are learning that energy flow along the meridians not only influences the physical body but the mind, emotional, and energy bodies as well.
Healing Stuck Energetic Patterns
Allergies, self-defeating beliefs and behaviors, negative self-talk, the emotional pain of loss, fears and phobias, cravings, trauma, shock — all of these can be treated with Energy Psychotherapy.
Energetic patterns or traces of events become part of one’s personal history. If they are negative events that we have not been able to heal, they continue to express themselves through the body, mind, emotions, and spirit, causing distress of some kind.
How Negative Energetic Patterns Affect Your Life
A characteristic of stuck energetic patterns is that they continue to attract experiences of the same resonance. For instance, you may attract the same kind of person over and over who is not good for you.
You may have multiple addictions. You may have similar troubles at work no matter what your job is. These are just a few examples. You may be able to tell me more from your personal experience of having a recurring problem that just won’t go away no matter what you do.
Immediate Progress with Energy Psychotherapy Techniques
The good news is that you do not need to spend years in psychotherapy trying to understand and work through these issues.
You can make noticeable progress with Energy Psychotherapy in the very first therapy session. The methods that I use are Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), Thought Field Therapy® (TFT), and Tapas Acupressure Technique® (TAT).
Energy Healing
Using the hands to comfort and soothe is the oldest healing method there is. With the fear of the unknown and the rise of scientific methods, this simple yet effective means of alleviating suffering was relegated to the past. It has refused to stay there, however, as people are discovering that modern medicine is not completely meeting their needs. Research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that every year more people are using alternative methods in their search for something that will help them. Research also found that people seek out alternative and complementary practitioners because they want to be seen as the complex individuals that they are instead of just body parts, and they want to have a more active role in their own healing process.
Finding Relief Where Other Treatments Have Failed
One of the most satisfying aspects of my energy healing practice is to alleviate a problem that a person may have had for months or years and for which no other treatment has been effective.
Many times a physician will prescribe medications that have harmful side effects or surgeries that do not cure the problem and sometimes make it worse. Eventually, the patient may be told that he or she will “just have to live with it.”
Relaxation as the Gateway to Healing
During an energy healing session, one of the first things that a person will notice is the deep sense of relaxation and well-being that occurs as their stress and anxiety levels drop.
This alone is healing, as stress and stress hormones are implicated in many serious disease states. As stress is relieved and the biochemistry comes into balance, the body’s natural ability to self-heal is enhanced. No matter what you are receiving healing interventions for, whether to relieve pain, accelerate healing, ease depression and anxiety, clear toxins, strengthen the body in preparation for surgery, or for any other reasons, the relaxed body can more effectively receive and utilize the healing energy. I have seen problems of long-standing—10 years, 20 years, even, in one case, 40 years addressed in one or two sessions. These may be atypical, but it gives an idea of the potential of energy healing under certain circumstances.
Hypnotherapy
One of the first questions you may have is, “What is the difference between hypnosis and hypnotherapy?”
The first stages in hypnosis and hypnotherapy are the same. Through hypnotic induction, the therapist helps you achieve a deep state of relaxation, then deepens it further until you are in a trance state.
Most people are familiar with the very deep trance state that you see in stage hypnosis demonstrations where the hypnotist makes suggestions that the subjects carry out, usually to the great amusement of the audience and the subsequent humiliation of the hypnotized person. These deep states may be useful for some situations, such as surgery without anesthesia, but there is no possibility of real problem-solving because the conscious mind, to all intents and purposes, is on vacation somewhere with no forwarding address.
The Difference Between Hypnotherapy and Traditional Talk Therapy
Hypnotherapy, in contrast, induces deep relaxation but a light to medium state of trance, so the conscious mind is an active participant in the session.
In a hypnotherapy session, you do your problem-solving and healing work in this trance.
You may wonder how that is any different or any better than just sitting in the counseling room with your therapist, talking over your problems, and working toward resolution. Having spent over 30 years doing exactly this kind of traditional talk therapy, I can tell you that there is a profound difference.
Accessing and Healing Source Events Through Hypnotherapy
When the body and the conscious mind are relaxed and in a trance state, this state opens the doorway to all the experiences and memories that are stored in your body and subconscious mind.
Whether you are aware of it or not, everything about our personal history gets recorded and stored. This allows you to go back to the initial events, called source events. If these events were traumatic and not adequately dealt with at the time so that healing could take place, they will show up as problems in our lives. They may contribute to or cause physical problems, emotional distress, self-defeating thinking and behaviors, feeling spacey and disconnected, problems in jobs or relationships, —these are just a few of the ways that unresolved traumas express in our lives.
Uncovering Past Life Influences Through Hypnotherapy
Sometimes a person in a hypnotized state will go back to a source event and discover that it is in a past lifetime.
Issues that I personally have seen with the source event in a past lifetime are chronic headaches, alcohol addiction, a pervasive sense of guilt and low self-esteem, being repeatedly betrayed in love relationships, sibling rivalry, not wanting to assume leadership positions, a feeling of being strangled, back and neck pain, wrist pain, and many different kinds of fears and phobias.
Healing Deep-Rooted Issues with Hypnotherapy
Source events that occur in this lifetime may have occurred very early in life, so early, in fact, that the conscious mind has no access to them and therefore they cannot be discussed and healed in traditional talk therapy.
There are therapists who believe it is unnecessary to delve into one’s past in order to solve current issues. I agree that in some instances that is true, but in the majority of cases, particularly those in which you have a recurring problem and definitely those for which you have tried many other things to little or no avail, you need to go deeper. Issues that are not healed at the source tend to pop up again. For example, research with people who have had weight loss surgery, which prevents them from eating as they were used to, frequently transfers their food addiction and their stress reactions to other substances and behaviors. The underlying issues that created the compulsive eating behaviors in the first place were not dealt with and were not healed by surgery.
Hypnotherapy enables you to get to the roots of the issues so that you can weed your life’s garden and experience its peace and beauty.
Past Life Regression Therapy
Past life regression therapy may provide the answers to a problem when you cannot pinpoint any reason for it in this lifetime. For example, I suffered from early morning headaches for over 20 years and could never figure out what caused them until a past life regression revealed that I had been killed by a blow to the back of the head and part of my spirit, or soul, was still connected to that lifetime. After I did the healing work on this, my headaches went from five a week to fewer than five a month.
When Traditional Methods Don't Work
My experience is an example of having tried many different things to solve the problem, which apparently was not solvable until I was able to discover and heal the source event. If you have tried many different things to resolve a problem, and it still persists, you might want to consider past life regression therapy.
Understanding the Influence of Past Lives on Current Challenges
When I say “problems,” they are not limited to physical issues. They can be anything in relationships, work, money, addictions, fears, phobias, or self-defeating behaviors; in other words, practically any area of life in which you feel stuck.
It seems unfair that we would not be consciously aware of how past lives influence our current lives and what issues we are here to heal this time around. This is one of the most convincing arguments against past lives as far as I am concerned, yet when people have a past-life experience, and it makes a huge difference in their lives, something is at work even if we can’t rationally explain it.
Loss and Bereavement Counseling
Loss, bereavement, grief—these are inevitable parts of life. On a continuum of losses, at one end are the minor ones, which are more like annoyances or a temporary sadness, but on the far end are the losses that plunge one into deep despair, into what might be called the dark night of the soul. When a loss is so painful, how does one find their way back into the light, into happiness, into a life that feels worth living? This is a journey that takes an indeterminate amount of time, depending upon the loss, its meaning to you, and the way it impacts your life. Death is the loss that we first think of when speaking about grief, but sometimes death is not the worst loss a person can experience. Divorce, loss of trust, betrayal; losing a home, a job, a homeland; loss of health and freedom—all these and more are losses that need to be identified, grieved, processed, and placed in context (integrated) into the big picture of your life.
The Importance of Expert Guidance
There is no getting around it; this is hard work, best done with a knowledgeable, compassionate guide, along with resources and techniques that you can do on your own.
Friends, families, and clergy may play a positive role in one’s healing from loss, but usually do not have all the skills necessary, and often the bereaved feel they can no longer burden others with their pain even though it is still present and resulting in distressing symptoms. You know if this describes you.
I do individual sessions for loss, bereavement, and grief.
The Importance of Spiritual Direction
Spiritual direction is often sought by individuals experiencing feelings of emptiness, lack of meaning, or confusion about their place in the world. This search can also arise from experiences of spiritual abuse, a desire to feel less isolated, or the realization that their current lifestyle is not fulfilling. Individuals may be unaware that they are seeking spiritual direction, but the signs include longing for deeper connection or understanding in life.
Navigating Spirituality and Religion
Spirituality is a deeply personal, inner journey that differs from religion. While religion often comes with specific doctrines and guidelines, spirituality allows for exploration of one’s own path without imposed rules. While a person’s spiritual journey may lead them toward religion, the process is individualized, and there is no universal answer. Spiritual direction serves as a guide to help individuals explore their own spiritual journey, offering support in discovering what aligns with their inner truths and needs.
Spiritual Direction
