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 affirm our innate right to determine our sexual, romantic, and gender identities; to choose the relationships that affirm us; and to explore our sexuality, romantic love, and friendship needs through consensual, loving, conscious, and mature connections. We have an innate right to autonomy in living the gender identity and embodiment that is congruent with our experience of self. It is not my job to decide what that is for you; rather it is my job to support you in discovering and manifesting your truth in yourself.
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 engage in continued trainings, including training in ethics, to maintain licensure.
My Approach to Counseling
I believe that there is innate goodness as the bedrock of every human soul. Every part of us wants to protect and serve that goodness, and truly believes it is working toward our best interests. Counseling is an intentional relationship in which I offer this knowing in connection to you as you are in this moment. My work is to receive all of your parts with friendliness and curiosity, and to help you in turn cultivate those qualities within yourself.
Of course, we know that this world is hard, and we experience suffering, and we need to learn to protect ourselves in hundreds of ways from being harmed, exploited, ridiculed, or losing the connections we need. Parts of us carry the hurt we’ve experienced in life, and other parts of us do their best to keep us from being hurt again. Sometimes the ways we protect ourselves end up causing us different kinds of pain and suffering. Sometimes they end up leaving us with a life that feels empty and dull. Sometimes they end up leaving us with a life of resentment and guilt. Sometimes they end up harming others in our efforts to protect ourselves.
Meeting our parts with love, care, and the effort to understand them is what leads to meaningful and lasting change. While we often think we need to remove, fix, or bury those parts, it is actually moving toward them with curiosity that helps these parts of us learn to relax and let go of the tactics that weren’t working for them. When we understand how our protections strove to serve us, we find opportunities to meet those needs in creative new ways that work much better for who we are. We may even find the opportunity for deep healing and freedom from those old pains.
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.
Our work is to help your parts to cease being at war with each other. Your problems are guides that lead us to what needs care. As you learn to care for your parts, your capacity to experience life fully and move effectively expands. This requires befriending painful experiences, and so you will not always “feel better” during or immediately after a session. Yet over time, you should observe greater ease, flexibility, and freedom from your emotional distress and other mental health symptoms.
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”).
All of us have experienced harm or distress from a position of disempowerment at some point in life, if only during our childhoods. That impact becomes a wound that our protector parts are constantly attempting to redeem, heal, or defend against for the rest of our lives. As we grow into adult bodies with greater social power, our protector parts may still be protecting us like we’re vulnerable children, but unaware of what resources and power we have available in the present moment.
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. Our Selves can help our protectors be more skillful in their necessary work of helping us navigate the world, and we can help our young parts release those painful stories that do not serve us.
My responsibility is 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 cause harm with the power of my position in our relationship. It is my job to be trustworthy, but yours to decide whether to trust.
I prefer the term “liberation” because it centers what we seek rather than what we resist. 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 useful in understanding 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.