I’m an aspiring counselor who enjoys exploring how people hold and discover that sacred relationship we each have with ourselves. I believe counseling is a container that supports that exploration, allowing someone to focus on their inner world where patterns and tensions emerge, as well as our deepest needs, wants, and desires. By bringing this material into conscious awareness, people can move towards psychological wholeness—a place from which we can step into intentional authorship of our lives.

I am drawn to the work of Carl Jung, a Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist, who famously said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Jung’s work centered on how to bring unconscious material into conscious awareness as a method to develop a more coherent sense of self, a process he called individuation.

Similar to Jung, I see that people encounter challenges when they are split off from parts of themselves, which can indirectly yet powerfully influence how we feel, think, and behave. As a consequence, challenges may show up in unexpected ways—in our relationships, at work, and even in our bodies. Or oftentimes, through symptoms such as depression, anxiety, or recurring patterns that feel too entrenched to change.

When does change happen? Very simply—when it hurts. I have found that we are only able to let go of our defenses, a barrier to change, when the pain of maintaining those same defenses begins to exceed the pain they are protecting us from. And from that very fragile and vulnerable place, change takes place slowly and deliberately. Through careful examination of how strategies that may have served us before are no longer working and through honoring those parts of ourselves that needed fierce protection in the first place, we can begin to cultivate new ways of being and relating that are in alignment with who we are today.