Announcement
Families First Therapy will be moving to a new location in early April! The new address is an office building on the corner of Rio Grande and Mountain. I will be relocating the office in order to work in the community that I am currently providing clinical services for. It is my hope that this will increase the ease for individuals and families seeking services! More information will provided in the near future.
Mission
The Mission of Families First Therapy is to provide the most effective, efficient, ethical, and genuinely helpful counseling services to the individual and families I have the privilege of working with.
Treatment PhilosophyCounseling is provided in an eclectic manner, which means that the techniques are selected in a manner to best-match to the unique needs and personality of the individual and family. I seek to foster a best fit between myself as a counselor and the individual and families I work with. If I am not the best fit for the problem that an Individual or Family is entering my office with, then I will work hard to assist the Individual or Family in finding the best possible counselor to address their unique struggles. I approach working with Individual and Families as an equal partner in wellness who provides some navigation as the Individual or Family is the boss of their life and chooses how quickly or slowly to work on the struggles they enter counseling with. I see the people that I work with as my teachers and partners in growth. You are the best expert on you!
Some of my guiding principles are:
- You have a natural impulse toward health and healing that strengthens when it is supported and nurtured; however sometimes our natural impulse toward healing gets stuck. Counseling seeks to help us get un-stuck.
- Counseling is collaborative partnership, not forced healing
- When we step out of auto-pilot we gain more freedom, choice, and often some relief; we also gain the ability to make more informed decisions about our lives.
- We get stuck in old ideas about ourselves that may no longer be true. Updating these beliefs enables new behaviors and a new sense of self. Psychologists call these Cognitive Distortions, and we all have these on some level.
- Working deeply on ourselves creates room for lasting change and disrupts unhealthy patterns in our lives.
- Our professional relationship is a place where you can use me to track your response to another person and to try out new behaviors and ways of being somewhere that you can also get gentle feedback.
- Counseling, like life, does not happen in a bubble. Our cultural factors are inseparable from our experiences in the world. All people deserve the same safe, accepting, and compassionate therapy experiences, regardless of race, sexual orientation, gender identification, age, religion, size, and physical ability.
While my work is spontaneous, improvisational, and tailored to your specific needs and desires, it is consistently informed by and grounded in an eclectic variety of theories and a large body of scientific research. This research strongly suggests that effective counseling can help! You have the right to refuse to participate in counseling or terminate counseling at any point. I am here to assist you in working on whatever problems you enter counseling with; however I seek to meet you where you are at and you are the boss of your own healing process! Effective counseling contributes to an increased sense of freedom and choice. It enables us to live life in a more informed and awake way, instead of stumbling through on auto-pilot. However usually along the way we may work through some fairly difficult psychological and emotional struggles. A common mantra in counseling is that it gets a little worse before it gets better because we are working on healing struggles rather than ignoring them.
