Hello! My name is Adam Lenker. I am a Licensed Professional Counselor, licensed in Texas and Wisconsin. Whatever you are dealing with, know that I am here to listen and support you uncover growth. I believe strongly in encouraging self-empowerment, focusing on choices and their results. Central to my theoretical orientation (Person-Centered, Existentialist) is a focus on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, being solution-focused, as well as encouraging mindfulness. A little bit about how I approach therapy. In creating an alliance with a new client, I adopt a stance of listening and confronting situations non-judgmentally and with compassion, acknowledging that this work is about you, and your life's goals and struggles. My practice is built around partnership with my clients, working hard to establish and maintain this therapeutic alliance. I do this by taking cues of direction, pace and depth from the people with whom I work, and allowing for immediacy to inform what is and is not working.

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

Someone might choose to work with me if you feel motivated to find/reconnect with your own power, which may have become blocked and/or covered up, as they have moved through seasons of life. Establishing or reconnecting with this core power begins by working collaboratively as partners on a team, to be seen and heard as individuals, to have lived experience validated, in order to help restore and empower control over what we can control, and find the patience to learn to deal with and accept that which we cannot directly control. Areas of clinical expertise include chemical dependency, stress and anger management, life adjustments, veterans’ issues, intimate and non-intimate partner abuse, crisis prevention and intervention, long-term illnesses and palliative counseling.

What treatment methods and tools do you utilize?

My theoretical foundation is that of being a Person-Centered therapist. As I see it and have experienced it, the person reaching out is at the center of the situation, and therefore possesses far more of the questions (and answers!) to the challenges they face, than may be believed. I also identify strongly, both professionally and personally, with the ideas found within Existential Theory. There is much of our experience we cannot control, but much of our inner strength and resolve comes when we can identify the power that lies within the choices we make, and how we can experience different results by making choices that more closely align with our goals, beliefs and/or values. I integrate both Cognitive Behavioral Therapy interventions, as well as mindfulness-based interventions.

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

Throughout my experiences working in mental health, I have discovered strong abilities to forge healthy therapeutic alliances with people of wide varieties of life-experience. I approach each appointment with a respectful curiosity and acknowledgment of the authority the individual possesses over their own experience. My approach is also filtered through a lens of trauma-informed care. Trauma often can leave a person with a sense of powerlessness. That trauma story is undoubtedly one part, but not the whole, of the person's story. I see it as an honor, to be invited into these intimate spaces, when a person shares their vulnerability with me, and in this risking of vulnerability, we turn toward the dissonance we may feel, and can find that, with the right support, the way out is through.

About Adam W. Lenker, MA, LPC, BC-TMH, CIMHP