Introduction

I have been a mental health counselor since I graduated in September 2013 with a Master’s in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from Antioch University Seattle. My professional counseling experience includes work with LGBTQIA people, homeless youth and adults, people with chronic mental illness, and people who have been incarcerated or sentenced for criminal charges. Liberation, connection, and aliveness are core values in my work. I honor the search for meaning and deep connection and recognize it takes a variety of forms. I am affirming of people in Pagan and Polytheist practices, queer community, polyamorous relationships, and who practice kink.

I have a Master of Arts in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from Antioch University Seattle. I practice in Seattle, Washington, via telehealth. I am a Licensed Mental Health Counselor (LH60608531).

My undergraduate degree was a Bachelor’s of English with a concentration of Creative Writing in Fiction. For five years, I worked as an editor for traditional print, commercial, and online content such as eLearning. As a result of the recession of 2008, I spent time working as a gas station attendant and Barista while working through graduate school. Creative writing is my first love, and my poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have been published in print and online media under the name Anthony Rella.

I am a Certified Internal Family Systems therapist, having completed Level I and II trainings, and Level 1 training in the Gottman Method.

As a member of the American Counseling Association, I adhere to their code of ethics. Should you have any problems with me, the ACA is one recourse you have; another is the Washington State Department of Health. I must engage in continued trainings, including training in Ethics, to maintain licensure.

My Approach to Counseling

I practice a therapy informed by Internal Family Systems (IFS), Psychosynthesis, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Focusing, Transpersonal and Integral psychologies, and Jungian depth psychotherapy. Spiritual growth, material needs, relationship satisfaction, political and economic influences, meaningful work, emotional safety, social connectedness, and value-directed actions are all relevant and necessary topics for therapy.

Counseling is a transformational relationship. Together we foster curiosity about life and friendliness toward the parts of you that feel stuck, hurting, guarded, or otherwise participate in your difficulties. We will get to know them so that we understand how they came to be the way they are, and help them become integrated in the whole.

My approach is not about “fixing” your problems or seeing you as “broken”. Instead I will help you in going deeper than your surface stories to find the roots of your distress. Our work is to help your parts to cease being at war with each other and instead work together for your greatest good. Your problems are guides that lead us to what needs transformation and healing.

Our work together can increase your capacity to experience life fully and move toward your goals, but it involves intentionally making space for pain, distress, and discomfort. You will not always “feel better” during or after a session. Yet if you continue work with me, you should observe greater ease, flexibility, and freedom from your emotional distress and other mental health symptoms. If this is not happening, please tell me so we can see needs to shift so I can better support you.

Counseling Concepts and Strategies

Liberatory Practice

Our work to become more fully ourselves includes healing the personal and collective harms engendered by exploitative systems and power imbalances. These conditions foster relationships within ourselves and with others that are based in rigid thinking (“it’s either this or that”), dominance (“I’m either winning or losing”), shame (“I would be rejected if people saw who I really am”), and isolation (“I have to do it all by myself”).

Moving toward liberation means both becoming more Self-led in your relationship with your many parts and more honest, collaborative, and connected in your relationships with others.

My responsibility is to strive to understand your experience, recognize the oppressive factors that are harming you, and help you identify the right actions for you to take. I must also be accountable when I enact oppressive dynamics. It is my job to be trustworthy, but yours to decide whether to trust. Regardless, we can good work together.

I prefer the term “liberation” because it centers what is desired rather than what is resisted. Liberation is a process of creating ourselves and our communities from our own values and beliefs, rather than defining ourselves by what we oppose. It is not important that you embrace my values or become a different kind of person, what matters is that you feel you have more options and may freely choose the person you are.

Western psychology has a history and continuing reality of legitimizing oppression, yet I believe psychotherapy offers tools and concepts that support liberation. Thus I strive to be transparent with you around issues of diagnosis, insurance, and hospitalization should they arise. A portion of the income I receive from this work goes toward larger liberatory projects such as the prison abolitionist group Critical Resistance and to Real Rent Duwamish.

Parts of Self

We experience ourselves as a whole, unified being, but we also contain a multitude of parts of self that are often in conflict. Some of these parts we like, some of them we hate. All of these parts have strengths and limitations that could be of great service to the whole self.

One great source of suffering in our culture is the unspoken story that we must be unitary beings with one opinion, one thought, one goal. When we experience inner conflict, which is inevitable, we foster war within as though only one part of us must be the “true, authentic” part and the other parts are “saboteurs.” When we start to accept this possibility that it is valid and normal to have conflicting desires, opinions, and beliefs, it is both deeply relieving and makes so much healing possible.

All of our parts, in their ways, want only what’s best for us and contribute to our wholeness. That is not to say that their strategies are always working for us. But when we can approach our parts with curiosity and gratitude, we can befriend even the most terrifying and hateful impulses and bring them into a collaborative alignment with our whole being.

Compassionate Witnessing

One way to understand what heals us of wounding is the capacity to bring compassionate, nonjudgmental presence to our pain. This helps to elicit what is called the Self in Internal Family Systems, that natural leader within you that is able to skillfully and intuitively connect with and heal your parts.

As your therapist I strive to offer this to you throughout our work together. I find mindfulness, Internal Family Systems, and Focusing to be powerful tools to this end. What is necessary is developing the capacity to simply be present with what is happening in ourselves without judgment. This is quite challenging, and yet so much healing and resilience happens as we access this state.

Psychospirituality

A psychospiritual approach includes the spiritual and non-rational as part of the therapeutic terrain. Various religious and spiritual approaches include their own ways of understanding and working with suffering, and we may find those frameworks better help you to understand parts of your distress. Spiritual practices and relationships with traditions, gods, ancestors, or other beings may also be invaluable to your healing and transformation. We may also look at how psychological factors are involved with and affect your relationship with these experiences.

If you are not spiritual or religious at all, we may never talk about any of this and still do great work.

What I most want you to take away from the above is that I do not approach these questions from an “either/or” perspective. Because our psychologies affect all of our relationships, they are of course relevant to how we understand and engage with spiritual realities. And because there is no part of us outside of the domain of spirit, it may show up in the most surprising moments.

My personal model of the human personality system relates to energy centers in the body recognized in several forms of medicine and spiritual practice. Our head tends to be where intellectualization and analysis occurs. The heart tends to be where our social wounds and social roles live, and tends to help us feel our emotions. The gut tends to be where our instincts and will live. The body that encompasses these centers both grounds us, gives us physiological information, and helps us stay in our wholeness that is greater than our parts. I find that when we feel stuck in one of these centers, checking in with other centers gives us new and important insights.

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