Life often hands us rough moments. Things are going well. We are puttering along then BAM! life hits us. That BAM or tragedy feels like our world caves in.
That tragedy could be then end of a relationship, a death in the family, loss of functioning, loss of a job, or a chronic disease taking a turn for the worse. Often times parents suffer through despair, guilt and shame when their kids suffer losses.
When tragedy hits it’s hard to know where to turn and what to do. At Lions Heart we are here to help ease your suffering and provide immediate relief. Often within the very first session clients feel relief. This comes as a result to the miracle of hope and support, but also the way we tailor our practice.
During your first session we will do the standard things: sign the clinic policies and administer a mood survey to see how you are doing and help diagnose your symptoms.
But, what separates us from many practices is we do not do extensive intakes or dwell in the past. Our focus is on the here and now so we can start providing immediate relief.
While we are focused on immediate relief and stabilization tools we do get the deeper issues. However, we let these naturally fill in over several visits. As we are talking thru these issues we discuss which tools and methods will be most helpful in addressing your goals and concerns. We then co-create a goals list.
Goals are typically 10 items are so and are objective and measurable, yet we do not put time frames down unless needed. We find this creates needless anxiety and can often be self-sabotaging. We encourage clients to take a copy or picture and read their goals out loud at least twice a day. This helps develop your reticular activation system to scan your environment, experiences and discussions for information in how you may move forward with your goals. It’s a very natural and effective process.
We feel it takes time to get to know someone and obviously you came in for a reason, to help feel better as well as heal and grow.
Click here for a list of the tools and methods we utilize at Lions Heart counseling.
It’s common after clients experience some relief to want to stop therapy. And while some clients are otherwise well functioning and healthy and just experienced some minor set back, many of the clients we work with have had ongoing trauma, abuse and neglect followed with challenging relationships. For those clients our recommendation is to take a break for a week or two after the initial crisis has passed then to lean back into therapy. With chronic depression and anxiety treatment may take an extended period of time. Often clients sabotage their connections and successes and rarely have feelings of moving forward for significant periods of time.
Our goal at Lions Heart is to maximize your wellbeing and to teach you tools to become your own therapist. Many of our clients have seen many other practitioners over 10-40 years of therapy. And while those were helpful, they find our program to be more significant and helpful, transformative even. Why is that?
In my mind it is because we have many methods and tools and view therapy in a unique way. We are your guide. The guide learns your inner landscape of your thoughts, emotions and behaviors and the things that trigger and set you back. Then teaches you how to use the tools to navigate these challenges. Then helps you practice and develop strength, confidence and mastery with those tools.
This is not a simple practice and definitely not for everyone. We specialize in working with treatment resistant depression, anxiety and relationship problems.
If you are ready to dig in and make some changes fill in the contact form below and give us a call to set up a free phone consultation.
All the tools mentioned above and EMDR. EMDR helps us reprocess upsetting events and traumas so you get less triggered when similar things happen. We have helped clients reduce their hyper vigilance and stress response to triggers often by 95% or more.