LMFT, 8 years of experience
New to Grow
Greetings! My name is Walker and I’m a Licensed MFT. Over the years I’ve helped scores of people find relief, real change, and greater fulfillment in their lives through psychotherapy and mindfulness based approaches. I offer weekly sessions online as a focused means toward healing and growth. I believe the process of therapy is not only an effective way to heal, it allows us to use our struggles to refine who we are, to cultivate wholeness and find freedom in our lives.
In our first session we will focus on what brought you to seek therapy at this time; what are you experiencing that is needing attention and care. I will seek to understand what’s happening for you on the mental, emotional, behavioral, and social levels. I will also work with you to begin identifying appropriate goals and objectives for our work and imagine together the best outcome for therapy. This will be collaborative and I will always be checking to make sure I understand your needs.
My approach is a diversion from mainstream psychology which focuses on identifying and treating disorders. Instead, my view is that such “disorders” are actually symptoms of living in a disordered society that doesn’t allow most people to develop some of their innate resources. I focus on working with clients to cultivate underdeveloped personal resources. This is about cultivating wholeness rather than fixing disorders. My aim is to be holistic and integrative, tailoring to your specific needs, seeking to bring balance to your life. That can mean attending to the mind and emotions; the felt experience of the body; the status of relationships and occupation; or one's relationship with the earth, the spiritual, or the unseen elements of life.
While I have years of experience helping people heal from general mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, and trauma, I find that most often these are in some way connected back to matters of relationship, intimacy, purpose, or existential and spiritual issues. I love working with people who not only want relief from depression and anxiety, but also want to live their lives to the fullest, who want to offer to the world the fullest expression of what only they can offer.
For years I’ve been using IFS to help clients move past the mental, emotional, and behavioral patterns that are no longer serving them. IFS recognizes that we all have multiple parts of our personality. Some of these parts are our protectors that operate subconsciously and automatically to keep us safe. But sometimes the ways these protectors have learned to do so are holding us back. In IFS we build new relationships with these parts and harness their strengths to help us in new constructive ways. Beyond our protective parts, there is a higher Self – a calm, compassionate, and wise presence. I help client’s by galvanizing this higher Self energy to lead their parts forward through life’s hurdles and achieve their personal goals.
A psychodynamic approach to therapy honors the power of the unconscious psyche. It holds that the conscious self is just a slice of who we are. So the work of psychodynamic therapy brings unconscious material into the conscious realm, because what remains in the unconscious will continue to control your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. In this approach we work with and access the unconscious by attending to emotions, images, memories, and dreams to make new connections, form new understandings, and increase your agency to live the life you’re yearning for.