Creative Counseling

Not every client enters therapy in crisis. Some arrive with stable employment, supportive relationships, intact families, financial security, and no obvious precipitating event. They may even struggle to answer one of our most routine intake questions: “What brings you to therapy?” Their answer may simply be, “I don’t know. Everything is fine. I just don’t feel like myself.” That answer deserves our curiosity. High-functioning clients can be particularly skilled at using exte

There are seasons when you can point directly to the problem. The relationship ended. The job is terrible. Someone died. Money is tight. Your family is in crisis. You know exactly why you’re struggling. And then there are seasons when, technically, everything is fine. You have people who love you. You have a place to live. Maybe your career is going well. Your children are okay. You’ve accomplished some of the things you once prayed, worked, cried, and fought for. When someon

When an adult child moves back home, families often assume the biggest challenge will be sharing space again. In therapy, I find that the harder part is often sharing roles. A 25-, 30-, or even 40-year-old child can walk through the front door, put their bags down in their old bedroom, and suddenly everyone is behaving like it's ten years ago. Parents start reminding, questioning, monitoring, and sometimes rescuing. Adult children may become defensive, dependent, or irritated

My 26-year-old son recently moved back home. He graduated from college in 2024, took a job across the country in 2025, and did what we so often encourage our young adults to do: he went out into the world and started building a life for himself. Now, after having some time and experience under his belt, he's decided he may want to go in a different direction. And I support that. I don't believe the first decision he made after college has to determine the rest of his life. At

A Clinician’s Guide to Looking Beyond the Words and Understanding the Patterns Beneath Couples’ Communication When couples come to therapy, one of the most common concerns we hear is some version of, “We just don’t communicate anymore.” It is an understandable way to describe the problem, but as therapists, we know that most couples are communicating quite a bit. They may argue, withdraw, become defensive, overexplain, shut down, criticize, pursue, avoid, send long text messa

I don’t usually get very personal in this space, but as I prepare to enter the final semester of my graduate program, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it has taken to get here. I’m 50 years old, a grandmother, and a full-time employee in a high-stakes leadership role. I have a family, a career, clients, responsibilities, and a life that does not particularly care whether I have a paper due Sunday night. Somehow, in the middle of all of that, I have made it to my final seme

One of the reasons Narrative Therapy continues to resonate with clinicians is that it asks us to shift our attention away from symptom reduction alone and toward meaning-making. Rather than viewing a diagnosis or presenting problem as the defining feature of a client's identity, Narrative Therapy invites us to become curious about the stories clients have developed around their experiences and the cultural, relational, and historical contexts that have shaped those stories. T

Every one of us makes sense of life through stories. We tell ourselves who we are based on our experiences, our relationships, our successes, our failures, and the messages we've received from the people and world around us. Over time, those stories become so familiar that we stop questioning them. They begin to feel like facts rather than interpretations. If you've ever caught yourself saying, "I'm just an anxious person," "I always ruin relationships," or "I'm never going t