Hello and welcome. First of all, thank you for seeking assistance for yourself as I know it is not easy. My name is Silvestre Rubio, but all my life people have called my Silver. I'm a Licensed Professional Counselor in Texas with over 11 years of experience. I work with the Adult who may be struggling with Anxiety, Depression, Stress, Relationship Issues, and who might be having issues adopting suitable coping skills to the daily challenges. We dive into many different techniques, but a session with me may feel like talking to a "professional friend", where we feel comfortable talking, but can feel like a positive change has happened by end of session. Please do not hesitate to reach out as I would love an opportunity to sit down and see if we are a good fit. Taking care of your mental health is important and I'm here to help.

What can clients expect to take away from sessions with you?

There are many goals to accomplish even on our very first session. The main goal of the first session with me is to determine if we will be a good fit for one another. It may take more than a few sessions to determine this, but from the first session we can get a feel for one another and if we both feel comfortable moving forward. I'm a down to earth person and will do my best to make you feel comfortable, so we will engage in casual conversation with smooth shifts and transitions to naturally shift to the subjects that may be difficult to speak about. Another goal of the first session is for me to get to know you and to do this, I will ask some questions about your history. This means I will ask about what brings you to therapy and questions about your history with the various challenges you have been experiencing. In addition, another goal is to cover the "housekeeping rules" and go over consent forms. The first session with me is a good dialogue back and forth with one another with each person contributing to about 50/50 of the conversation. In future sessions the conversation will be about 80/20 with the client doing more of the talking. One last goal of the first session is to make sure you leave the session feeling heard, listened to, and maybe even with a possible direction in which to focus our sessions in. No counseling takes place the first session, but a positive change may have occurred that we may have established a good plan for the first few sessions going forward with established, realistic goals.

Explain to clients what areas you feel are your biggest strengths.

I feel my greatest strength as a provider has been to make the person in front of me feel comfortable speaking about some of the toughest subjects of their life. We call this establishing rapport. The professional relationship with your counselor is very important and to establish a good relationship, one must feel comfortable in speaking to them. This is far from easy and may take a few sessions to do so, but one thing that I take pride in is giving my Client unconditional positive regard. In other words "I got your back, no matter what happens to be said". Opening up to anyone is very difficult and I do my best to never judge the person in front of me. In addition, I believe I have picked up a strong knowledge in different etiologies through the years with multiple techniques from CBT, DBT, Mindfullness, Positive Psychology, etc. Whatever techniques we chose to use are very important, but in order to hear anything I may have to say, I do my best to make sure my Client feels heard and listened to.

About Silvestre Rubio