True You Therapy & Wellness
Portland, OR
Accepting New Clients!
I believe that everyone has the capacity of healing, growing, changing, and self-actualization. Exploring systems of privilege and power together with clients to investigate the impact of those systems on their lives and general well-being is central to the work. I feel that our experiences, whether they are positive or negative, have something profound to tell us about ourselves and our lives. By actively listening to client stories and exploring their inner world without judgements or assumptions, themes and patterns begin to emerge and connect within the client’s experiences. The goal is to increase self-awareness and understanding by helping clients gain insight into their own thoughts and feelings.
I also believe strongly in the relationship between client and counselor being at the core of therapeutic work, and subsequently will spend a considerable amount of time getting to know you as an individual–your passions, interests, people/systems/resources in your life, and other foundational factors. People are unique and complex; we are social, physical, spiritual, and psychological beings. Our work should always reflect and honor that complexity.
Our identities are vital to our navigating and understanding the world around us, and I believe they should be at the forefront of our clinical work together. For me, that means recognition of my positionality both in society as well as the counseling room as a white, straight, male in a society that privileges those identities in a variety of deeply held, institutionalized ways.
At the core of this process is the central belief that I am another human on the path that we call life. While it is true that I have training and a certain set of skills for this particular work, it does not make me the expert of your life--in fact, you are the expert of your life!
My journey is one of a person who thought that he had life figured out at 25 years old--career (school teacher), newly purchased house, and a wedding planned for the summer. Then my father died, unexpectedly, at the age of 50. Six weeks before the wedding. That event was the catalyst for a years-long process, fueled by grief and a deep desire to find something more in life, that led me to such diverse places as a ten-day silent meditation retreat in the northern California hills all the way to an intensive-outpatient mental health program in North Portland. It was here, in the program meant to investigate why I didn't want to be alive anymore and build me up to step back into my life that I realized something: that the life that I had been living, in some ways, was simply the life I felt was expected of me. Whether through explicitly stated or internalized expectations, I had made a road map of where life was supposed to go, and the feelings I was supposed to have along the way and when I got there.
What I found, the more I investigated, was that I had spent so long trying to live my life by that map that I didn't stop to think about the meaning behind the journey. I came to see my own stuckness in my life as an indicator that I wasn't being my true self, and began (with the help of an existential therapist--my original introduction to existential therapy) to unpack my own meaning and purpose in life and find the things that were not pushing me towards that meaning and purpose. The classroom was one of the places, I found, that needed to go and I began my journey into mental health as a profession shortly after leaving the field of education.
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