Therapeutic Approach

 

Where Story Meets Meaning, and Presence Holds the Space

As a Mental Health Counseling Intern, my therapeutic work is rooted in the belief that who we are as professionals cannot—and should not—be separated from who we are as people. Integrity, presence, and deep authenticity are not just qualities I bring into the room with clients; they are the room.

💛 Way of Being: How I Show Up

At my core, I am guided by integrity—emotional, ethical, and spiritual. When something feels misaligned, I listen inward. That self-attunement forms the foundation of how I sit with clients: grounded, emotionally present, and real. I don’t try to “play therapist”—I show up as a whole person, because I believe healing happens when we feel safe enough to bring our whole selves into the light.

Presence matters. I am drawn to existential work because it welcomes questions without easy answers: Why me? Am I enough? What now? And I am called to narrative therapy because it honors the uniqueness of each person’s lived story—and the possibility of rewriting it.

🧠 Way of Understanding: How I Conceptualize Client Concerns

When someone walks into the room, I listen for the story behind the story. I ask myself:

• What concerns are underneath this pain?

• What narratives are shaping this person’s reality?

• Where do culture and identity influence the way they see themselves?

• Where are the unspoken or forgotten threads of resilience?

I view distress not as random but as deeply linked to unresolved existential realities: identity, freedom, meaning, isolation, loss. I also recognize that we often live inside stories we never chose—or outgrew a long time ago.

Narrative and existential frameworks help me see both the universal truths and the individual voices that shape each client’s experience.

🔧 Way of Intervening: How I Practice

Intervention begins with dialogue. Honest, often slow, sometimes quiet dialogue that allows meaning to emerge.

I work to:

• Externalize problems so clients can see their story from a new angle

• Walk with them to the edge of old assumptions to uncover new truths

• Honor trauma, culture, and systems of oppression without losing sight of agency and hope

• Invite clients to ask: Is this story still serving me? What could change if I wrote a new chapter?

I don’t rush the process. I sit in the heaviness when needed. I reflect, reframe, and witness. Always with the goal of helping someone reconnect with their own core integrity, voice, and capacity for choice.

🧩 My Integrated Model: Existential + Narrative Therapy

My model is an intentional integration of existential and narrative therapy, because these are not just theories I use—they are how I live and see the world.

• Existentialism helps me support clients in exploring life’s unavoidable truths: freedom, responsibility, identity, isolation, death, and meaning.

• Narrative therapy gives us tools to explore how those truths are shaped, voiced, silenced, or reframed through the stories we tell ourselves and others.

This integration allows me to focus on collaboration, agency, and meaning-making, rather than symptom elimination. I believe that suffering holds potential—not for pathologizing—but for integration, growth, and transformation.

Even where existentialism centers the universal human condition and narrative theory focuses on culturally constructed stories, I find harmony in holding both. That bridge is me—honoring both the collective and the personal in the therapy space.

🌌 In Closing

This isn’t just a clinical model. It’s a reflection of who I am.
A mother. A writer. A witness. A counselor-in-training who believes that story, when reclaimed, becomes sacred ground.