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Medical Ways of Seeing Yourself

This may not be the first time or place you have looked for support. You may have been down many medical roads or even researched questions yourself on the internet. You might have been labeled or given a diagnosis. Perhaps you even gave one to yourself after reading some criteria on the net. Diagnosis such as bipolar, borderline personality, ADHD, aspergers, OCD, fibromyalgia, schizophrenia, ODD and PTSD are ones that often bring people to therapy.

My training allows me to identify and treat people who have been labeled with these medical labels. However, throughout this website you will not find use of these disorders for a very important reason: I partner with people, not diseases. Disease categories in mental health have very little hard science behind them. They have been codified primarily within the past fifty years because of the need to have a way to determine who should be eligible for health insurance. Mental health diagnosis say more about funding and money than they say about people’s bodies, cultures, lives, experiences and physiology.

In some cases, we refer to techniques that effectively address these diagnoses as “evidence based”. This term refers to groups that have raised sufficient money to do research that can be regarded as dependable. Sometimes the resulting research is solid and dependable. Sometimes it reflects the biases of the money that funded the research to begin with.

“This organ-centric, acute-care model of medical practice…is of limited power at best, helpless at worst in the face of symptoms that cut across multiple organ systems.” Dr Jeffrey Bland

Modern neuroscience, combined with ancient wisdom, has allowed us to see that what underlies all challenges to our mental health are some very basic things: nervous system dysregulation, family patterns of attachment, nutritional neglect, and cultural and personal values and needs. Because we understand these more and more, psychotherapists are not dependent on classifying people with disorders in order to help them improve their health.

Our work together strives to uncover the things that challenge you. We always seek to work with the real you, not the label and not the medical list of symptoms. I am trained to support you if you have been given a diagnosis and it is my privilege to walk past that with you. Together we walk the road to wholeness and joy.
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If you just set people in motion they'll heal themselves. - Gabrielle Roth — If you just set people in motion they’ll heal themselves.
– Gabrielle Roth

Forgive the Tears that fell for few, but that few too many, for was not each a World? - Emily Dickinson — Forgive the Tears that fell for few, but that few too many, for was not each a World?
– Emily Dickinson

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Mental Health is a process. It is not a disease to be cured by locating a pathology, taking a pill, or even talking about a disorder. Spiritual and physical health can only be achieved by examining systems, webs of interactions and movements, and by working with the whole organism to create a new felt sense of equipoise. - Judy Rintoul — Mental Health is a process. It is not a disease to be cured by locating a pathology, taking a pill, or even talking about a disorder. Spiritual and physical health can only be achieved by examining systems, webs of interactions and movements, and by working with the whole organism to create a new felt sense of equipoise.
– Judy Rintoul

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Functional medicine looks not at the disease - assumed to be isolated in a single organ system - but at the patient. - Dr. Jeffrey Bland, regarded as the father of functional medicine. — Functional medicine looks not at the disease – assumed to be isolated in a single organ system – but at the patient.
– Dr. Jeffrey Bland, regarded as the father of functional medicine.

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Surgeons can cut out everything except cause. - Herbert M. Shelton — Surgeons can cut out everything except cause.
– Herbert M. Shelton

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