Individual Counseling

Individual Counseling

3Rivers Center for Relationship therapists work with the whole spectrum of individual counseling issues and needs, and with every age group. Please click on the tabs below to find out more about each area and which practitioner specializes in the particular needs you might have.

If no specific clinician is listed, it is an area in which every 3Rivers Center therapist can provide qualified support and counseling.

 

Adults • Teens • Children

 All of the clinicians at 3Rivers Center work with adults, both individually and as couples.
Adolescence is a formative and often challenging time of life.  At 3Rivers Center, we teach parents and teens to work together to develop a deeper understanding of brain science and an appreciation of adolescence as a positive period of growth and change.  Working with teenagers can be done in the context of individual therapy or family therapy.

Clinicians working with teens: Contact Bea Leadyard

Bea Ledyard, MS has been a counselor and educator, working with children for 40 years.

Emotional Conflict & Growth

Unless otherwise noted all therapists at 3Rivers Center for Relationship offer therapy for the conditions listed below
An estimated 19 million adults in the US are living with major depression. Depression may be described as feeling sad, blue, unhappy, miserable or down in the dumps. Most of us feel this way at one time or another for short periods of time. However, if you have been experiencing any of these symptoms for more than two weeks and are finding it difficult to participate in the regular activities of your life, you may want to consider seeing a professional. All of the clinicians at 3Rivers Center are experienced in working with people who suffer from depression.

Anxiety is a normal occurrence as a result of stress in both the mind and the body. Stress can come from any event or thought that makes you feel frustrated, angry, or nervous. Anxiety is a feeling of fear, unease and worry and the source of these symptoms is not always known. All of the clinicians at 3Rivers Center are experienced in working with people who suffer from anxiety or stress.

While stress is a normal physiological response to living in the everyday world, there are times when the amount of stress one experiences can be overwhelming. At 3Rivers Center for Relationship, we are trained in various techniques and practices to help you reduce the negative impacts of stress and find a more balanced approach to your life.
Anger is an emotion characterized by antagonism towards someone or something. While anger can give you a way to express negative feelings, or motivate you to find solutions to problems, excessive anger can be damaging to your physical health, and your personal and professional relationships.

Everyone experiences grief and loss at some time in their life. The more significant the loss, the more intense the grief is likely to be. Each individual experiences and expresses grief differently.  For example, one person may withdraw and feel helpless, while another might be angry and want to take some action. No matter what the response, the grieving person needs the support of others. At 3Rivers Center, we are all prepared and trained to help support you through your own individual process.
Ready or not, we all go through numerous transitions in our lives—childhood to adolescence, high school to college, starting a new job, getting married (or divorced), losing a spouse, etc. Whatever the circumstances, navigating this gray zone of change can be difficult, presenting us with new problems and requiring us to respond in new ways. At 3Rivers Center for Relationship, all of our clinicians can help you negotiate this time in your life.
Interpersonal Neurobiology, also known as IPNB, is a term coined by Dr. Dan Siegel in the early 1990s. It is not a therapeutic technique, but rather a field of scientific study that seeks to understand what it means to be human. It provides a way of viewing how the mind, the brain and relationships are interrelated by specifically examining mental processes within the human experience, looking at how energy and information flow within us and between us. IPNB promotes compassion, kindness and resilience in our personal lives, our relationships and our communities.

At 3Rivers Center we value the importance of teaching you about yourself, helping you to make sense of who you are, embracing the notion that knowledge and understanding are the basis for our well-being.

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Play Therapy

Play Therapy and Expressive Arts offer both children and adults a creative, safe way to explore difficult emotions and life experiences leading to healing and greater self-understanding.  Using a variety of playful tools (sandtray, stories, games) and expressive arts (writing, drawing, painting, clay, acting, music, movement) a client is both guided toward and empathically accompanied in their self-expression. This allows an integration and healing of painful experiences (trauma, loss) and mood states (depression, anxiety) and a return to an innate sense of well-being and self-confidence.

Contact Bea Leadyard

Dream Work

Dreams are a rich resource for both healing and growth.  In listening carefully to our dreams we can understand our life patterns more fully and in this way bring our ourselves most creatively into life.  Our dreams teach us that we are more than we appear to be.  In our dreamwork we will use tools and insights from Jungian depth psychology, expressive arts, psychodrama and various ancient spiritual traditions.

Contact Bea Leadyard

Trauma

About Trauma

Any life event which causes significant physical and/or emotional injury or distress, in which the person powerfully experiences being overwhelmed, helpless, or trapped, can be defined as a traumatic experience. What is PTSD?

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, is a psychological reaction occurring after experiencing a highly stressing traumatic event usually characterized by depression, anxiety, recurrent nightmares, and avoidance of reminders of the event.  The trauma event may involve serious injury, the threat of death, or any experience that creates intense feelings of fear, helplessness, or terror. PTSD doesn’t always, however, have to be associated with a “big” trauma.  It can be created through harmful “small” traumas that one might endure repeatedly in life. The symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder include the re-experiencing of the trauma either through upsetting thoughts or memories or, in extreme cases, through a flashback in which the trauma is relived at full emotional intensity. Brainspotting is a powerful tool to reduce not only the symptoms, but the root of the trauma

About Brainspotting

  • Brainspotting is a powerful, focused treatment method that works by identifying, processing and releasing core neurobiological sources of emotional/body pain, trauma, dissociation and a variety of other challenging symptoms. Brainspotting is simultaneously a form of diagnosis and treatment which is deep, direct, powerful, and contained.
  • Brainspotting functions as a neurobiological tool to support the clinical healing relationship. There is no replacement for a safe, nurturing therapeutic presence and the ability to engage another person in a contained and trusting relationship where they feel heard, accepted, and understood.
  • Brainspotting gives us a tool, within this clinical relationship, to locate, process, and release experiences and symptoms that are typically beneath the conscious mind ~ beneath thoughts and even language.
  • Brainspotting works with the deep brain and the body through its direct access to the autonomic and limbic systems within the body’s central nervous system. Accordingly, it is a physiological tool/treatment which has profound psychological, emotional, and physical consequences.
  • Brainspotting taps into and harnesses the body’s innate self-scanning capacity to process and release personal areas/systems which are in a maladaptive homeostasis (dysfunctional patterns). This may also explain the ability of Brainspotting to often reduce and eliminate body pain and tension associated with physical conditions. This is the body in its wisdom!

Read more about Brainspotting and its worldwide successes.

Contact Miriam Ramsey for these therapies

LGBT

Love and the complexities of relationship are not limited to race, gender, national boundaries, or spiritual beliefs. Gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, and transgendered individuals ask the same questions and make the same statements of frustration as any other person facing life’s challenges. With the added burden of living as a minority in a fear-reactive collective, many LGBT persons have carried additional stresses in areas of life that the greater community may not recognize. Though it might be said that most in the LGBT community (or isolated from any community) might be better off if the “straight” world would receive counseling, there are many good reasons why many who are wondering, or those who are already clear, on where they land on the complexity of identity, sexuality, race, art, etc, etc—on the continuum of human expression, may benefit from connecting with a warm and compassionate counselor in a safe and confidential environment. Whether you are a couple fighting each other, or an individual fighting with yourself, we are here to help you.

Sexuality

Sexuality is an amazingly complex area of human experience. It can be deeply fulfilling and it can be a source of great pain and frustration. Sexuality and sensuality are often part of relationship counseling with issues like lack of time, emotional conflict, boredom, etc. Sometimes sexuality is a primary concern with issues such as large desire differences, physical functioning, past trauma, sex addiction, and particular aspects of infidelity recovery.  Individuals too can and do seek understanding, healing and/or change in their sexual lives.

Sex may be the primary concern either because it’s severely lacking, or even though it is okay, there is a deep desire to move toward more satisfying, ecstatic and/or spiritual experiences. In other words, when there is a substantial gap between what they have and what they want. Also, some people are interested in help with areas and interests such as fantasy, kink, fetishes, addiction, and/or non-traditional relationship configurations such as open relationships, swinging, or polyamory.

Gender is another area that can be a powerful area for people in learning how they feel best-suited and most comfortable, or for those who are comfortable with their gender identity yet their self-expression runs into difficulty in a world that often doesn’t accept those that don’t fit the norm.

Of course all of these issues can occur for people regardless of their sexual orientation, which is yet another entire dimension of sexuality. As we said, it’s a complex area of people’s lives.  Our basic approach is sex-positive with openness, acceptance, and bringing knowledge and awareness of this still culturally taboo field together with traditional counseling skills and knowledge of ways to help people toward healthy, happy, authentic  lives.

Attraction, sexuality, sensuality, and gender can be a source of great joy, intimacy, ecstasy, playfulness, depth, expression.  It is (or can be) a key element of many people’s life-force, bringing energy, color, and vitality.  Our opportunity is to make the most of it.