About Therapy With Me
It Usually Starts With One Sentence
Somewhere in the middle of a session, you say something you’ve said to yourself for years and never once to anyone. That you can’t keep doing this. That you’re going to run out before the week does.
I’ll ask you to say it again. Then we both stop and actually look at it, which is not something you can do while you’re the one saying it.
Where did that one come from, and how long has it been running? What happens to the rest of your day once it shows up?
That’s most of what the hour is. One thought at a time, out of your head and somewhere the two of us can see it.
We Become Detective Partners
You bring what happened and what you made of it. I bring the questions, and I don’t decide in advance which thoughts are going to turn out to matter.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is the clinical name for this. From where you’re sitting it’s two people getting curious about the same thought and following it back to wherever it started.
Curiosity is the part that matters. Nobody talks themselves out of a belief by criticising it, and by the time you get to me you’ve usually given that a long try.
What Turns Up That You Didn’t Come In For
Look at enough single thoughts and the pattern behind them comes into view. That’s what unmasking an unhelpful pattern amounts to, and it’s usually where the work gets interesting.
It’s also where people find out the file is about something other than what they opened it for. You come to me for anxiety, and a few sessions in we’re both looking at a long history underneath the anxiety that nobody has ever gone through with you.
When that happens I’ll tell you, and then it’s your call. Nothing gets quietly steered toward a problem you didn’t bring me.
Either way the aim doesn’t change. A self-defeating cycle gets a lot easier to interrupt once you can see the whole loop.
This Part Takes Two People
I’d rather say this early than at the point where it matters. Therapy is a two-person job, and the half that happens without me is the half that decides how far this goes.
Most weeks end with something for you to try before the next one. When it doesn’t get tried, the following hour goes to working out why, and that’s a reasonable hour to spend once.
Twice, and the plan is the thing to look at, because a plan nobody runs is usually a bad one. I push on it because hope comes back from your side of the week, out of one thing you tried that worked better than you expected.
I like the people I work with, and I’m going to ask anyway. That’s most of what the liking is for.
About Joshua Wile, M.S., NCC
Asking that many questions for a living only works if you actually want the answers.
When I’m not at work, I enjoy spending my time with my family and immersing myself in nature.
The formal version: my Master’s in Counseling is from Texas A&M University-Commerce, and I’m a National Certified Counselor. The Beck Institute is where I trained in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. EMDR came after that, including specific training in using EMDR for panic attacks, along with trauma-focused CBT.
That’s about eight years of this now, the most recent of them on my own. I don’t know that any of it sets me apart from the next counselor with the same list, but it’s the reason I can tell you what we’re doing and why.
Send Me the Sentence You Keep Saying
Write to hopenowcounseling@gmail.com and tell me the sentence. Whatever your head has been repeating at you lately, in the words it actually uses.
What comes back from me will be a question about it, because that’s the first move of the work and there’s no reason it has to wait.
Send It in Your Own Words
You Can Come Back Without Starting Over
You finish, and you can still write to me. If something new shows up down the road, I’d rather hear from you again than have you start from the beginning somewhere else.
I mean that as a standing arrangement rather than a nice line to end on.
When a message lands in my inbox, I’m the one who reads it. I’ll write back and ask what’s going on and what you’d want to be different. Writing that first message is the hard part, and it doesn’t have to be a good one.