As a therapist with a budding private practice, I frequently get the questions, “What do you specialize in?” The question they are really asking is what pathology of human existence do I specialize in treating.
It is a medical model approach, I was taught it as well, and I am guilty of the question as well. In Western culture we treat after symptoms arise and especially in mental health when symptoms become problematic to our daily functioning, this is our path to diagnosis and treatment.
As I shift, as I continue my journey and continue to honor myself in each action, thought, and create space for my being, I realize there are no pathologies. These are only ways which our bodies and minds learn to protect us from fears, stressors, and traumas. These protections served at one time and they helped us to survive, may no longer be serving once the stressor, abuse, event has passed.
If I stay with the medical model, I treat the manifestations of trauma which to me are all manifestations which take us away from our life’s purpose; these are much broader than anxiety, food addiction, depression, or PTSD, or unexplainable somatic disorders like auto-immune and pain, which I am forced to list as my specialties.
My passion is much greater, my greatest joy when I work with others, is when I get to witness the process of coming into their being, allowing, accepting, rejoicing, relaxing in all of their being.
I am a guide with my client to what resonates with their being, to expand the ways they align with those sensations, actions, and feelings. I am guide to finding the blocks externally and internally to this. With these insights, awareness, my responsibility as therapist is provide them a container for practice to choice in response versus reaction, a space to find the soul’s song, and practice the actions of self-care to inhabit and be more of themselves after they leave my office.
Yes the diagnostic model allows me to know the blocks and automatic reactions of defense created by the body-mind. I am grateful for the training in these sign posts. My hope for my clients is the same as my hope for myself, that I expand my being past the “relief of symptoms” to finding a broader connection to my own soul, joy of intimacy with myself, and therefore connection with all life.
I have a passion in sharing the freedom to be, simply to be.