This page addresses frequently asked questions about both Counseling and Mindfulness. If you have further questions, please reach out to us through Denette@DenetteMann.com.
To choose counseling is to choose to take control of your own life. Those who bring us into the world have an impact on us emotionally, physically, and mentally, before we are even born. Because of this, all of us carry UNCONSCIOUS beliefs and feelings that no longer serve us as adults. Common beliefs include:
I’m not worthy
I’m bad
I’m clumsy
I’m not likable.
Take a moment and remember your own childhood. Even well-meaning and loving parents get angry and hurt us with their words because they have forgotten how words are taken in by an immature brain. The primary feeling that accompanies all of these is shame. Shame is a sense of being bad at the core; there is nothing to be done when we are shameful.
An effective counselor has gone through the process and learned the many varied ways these show up in each of us. Choosing a counselor is choosing to develop a relationship with someone who cares, listens well, and travels with you using their knowledge, compassion, understanding and acceptance of the journey in all its forms. That type of companioning enables us to choose what beliefs and values we want to carry with us for the rest of our lives.
ONE: find a highly qualified licensed person who specializes (has special training) in the topic you want to pursue in therapy.
TWO: pay attention to how you feel when you’re with the person. If you’re relaxed, comfortable, and reassured, great. If not, look for someone else. The relationship is the most important factor in getting success in the CP.
THREE: When you choose the therapist you want to work with, you will have an initial session called an “Intake”. This is a session to gather necessary information and a time for setting goals and finding out about the counselor’s policies and procedures for you.
FOUR: Weekly, one-hour sessions are most common after the Intake. A relationship that is safe and rewarding should follow and the two of you will together focus on the goals you have set for yourself. There are many different ways of experiencing this journey, different talk approaches and different experiential methods.
At its most effective, the counseling relationship is one in which you will feel honored, respected, understood, accepted, and cared-for. You will have someone who knows you deeply and wants the best for you (the goals you’ve identified). Your counselor will travel with you through the emotional, often physical and cognitive journey into what’s holding you back from being the person you know you are (living your goals), help you accept and acknowledge gracefully what you find. At the end of this journey, the real you will emerge and you will notice your goals are no longer goals but how you are living your life.
Trauma requires a highly specialized counseling approach. There are several approaches to helping people with trauma heal. Each works as long as two things are true:
- The counselor feels comfortable and has expertise in the approach, and
- You are comfortable with the approach.
Each approach utilizes specific skills, or techniques, to heal. Some examples are:
- EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing)
- Bilateral stimulation
- Establishing internal resources and creating a calming place you create in your mine to keep you stabilized as you go into the trauma
- Adaptive information to build a reparative narrative
- IPNB (Interpersonal Neurbiology)
- Body focused (noticing physical sensations and emotions)
- Understanding your relationship patterns from birth and evaluating how that impacts the trauma
- Experiential activities including:
- Sand Tray
- Art
- Movement
- Sound
- Meditation
- Mindfulness and Self-Compassion
- Meditation practices
- Self-Compassion practices
- Ways to rewire the brain through education of how the brain works
- Somatic Experiencing
- Psychodrama
- Trauma-based Cognitive Therapy
Mindfulness is living in the moment, noticing your surroundings through your senses as well as being aware of your internal world. Stress mostly occurs due to the following:
- We are experiencing fear and worry about something from the past or coming up in the future
- Regretting something
- Ruminating over something we don’t like but can’t solve, and
- Feeling pressure from a prior occurrence.
Bottom line is that stress is mostly past or future-oriented and lies in our thoughts rather than in our actual experience. Therefore, stress and mindfulness cannot co-exist since mindfulness is a form of being in the presence with acceptance and stress is often mentally driven and fought against. Fritz Perls, a German psychologist famously stated “Get out of your mind and into your life”.
We humans have what Dr. Paul Gilbert (psychologist in the UK and founder of Compassion-Focused Therapy) calls “a tricky brain”. Our brain is wired to look for danger every 4 seconds and we aren’t even aware of it. Very frequently, in our 21st century world, the brain finds danger. It might be:
- A look
- Car speeding by
- Finger thrown our way
- Running out of the main course at our dinner party before everyone has served themselves
- Argument with someone close to us
- A teacher messages us about our child’s problem behavior in the classroom
- We are close to retirement age and the Human Resources manager has scheduled a meeting with us
When the brain finds danger, we ‘flip our lid’ letting the older, most emotional part of the brain, take over. With mindfulness we can rewire and re-train our brain so that it spends more time in the present moment and comes back to it quicker when it’s highjacked by a threat or thought of threat.
Over time we can be quicker to bring our mind back to the present. We can bring our smart, newer part of our brain back online faster so we more accurately assess and respond to stimulus (STIMULI) that we inevitably experience.
Intrusive Thoughts are generated from a brain wired to take a worrying or stressful experience and create nightmare scenarios that keep running over and over. Intrusive Thoughts occur in brains that have not been brought under the control of its owner. How does one bring the brain under some control? Mindfulness! How? Mindfulness is the brain simply noticing the inner and outer experiences of the person who owns it. There’s no room for Intrusive Thoughts when our brain is engaged with our senses and our inner experience of our senses. What helps us achieve mindfulness? The practice of meditation or stillness – similar to working out at the gym to build muscle. There are many benefits beyond silencing Intrusive Thoughts. For more information on the benefits of mindfulness you might want to visit this site.
You wouldn’t go to your hair stylist to give you advice on how to grow a hydrangea plant successfully. Mindfulness training requires a highly trained mindfulness coach if you want your practice to thrive. Mindful coaches have personal meditation practices and have training to be a coach. When looking for a mindfulness coach you can assess their qualifications by : 1) Asking for their credentials, 2) Determining what the personal meditation practices the coach uses, and 3) Research the amount of experience they have in coaching. A highly trained mindfulness coach: 1) has been trained well by a certified meditation trainer, 2) has an extensive personal practice, and 3) has successfully coached with supervision and without for at least 6 months.
Families are systems and each member has an important role in the family. Sometimes the role each member has in the system works in the family as a whole and for the individual. It doesn’t always work that way; often at least one family member fills a needed role that keeps the family together but is not best for their personal growth. For instance:
- the ‘scapegoat’,
- the ‘lazy one’,
- the ‘smart one’,
- the ‘problem child’.
When a family member (or members) adopts a role that threatens the closeness and security of the family unit, family counseling is the best choice to identify, understand, and shift the role(s). Family counseling enables and empowers parents to make positive changes to their family system and benefits each family member.
Family counseling works in many different ways. Depending on the goals and current family distress, the counselor may do parent education/coaching while working individually with parents. Children may benefit from attending both individual counseling and sessions with sibling(s) depending on the issue at hand. The goal is to eventually have every family member in a session together and everyone able to be emotionally and physically open so that each family member is open to making positive changes to benefit the and to other family members.
A family therapist should be well-trained in working with all ages – family sessions are structured around the youngest child. Otherwise, young children become disruptive. A Registered Play Therapist who is also trained in family systems is someone with the best credentials. A family system therapist is also a good choice.
Like most therapists, I do not utilize a single therapy theory. I am expertly trained in several theories as well as several modalities. Theory is a guiding principle of how people develop, what their basic needs are, and how they change. A modality consists of the ways the theory is brought into the session. Depending on a person’s goals and relationship style, I tailor my approach to best help each client.
The baseline of my style of therapy is Gestalt Therapy, which uses specific strategies to create complete acceptance of oneself.
Other trainings I utilize are complimentary to Gestalt theory; they include mindfulness and self-compassion, interpersonal neurobiology), person-centered therapy (the client is in charge of taking the therapy experience where they need it) and EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) which is a holistic approach to healing trauma of all types.
Links to more information
The modalities I frequently utilize are
- Traditional talk therapy
- Art therapy
- Play therapy with children 11 years of age and younger
- Sand tray therapy
- Experiential therapy
Teletherapy counseling is a therapy session that takes place online via a HIPAA compliant program to protect the client’s privacy. In the event that a client cannot meet in-person with a therapist they trust, teletherapy is helpful for conducting sessions. Research suggests that teletherapy is secondary in efficacy to in-person sessions, yet nonetheless effective in practice. There are state laws that govern when a therapist is permitted to do teletherapy. You will want to ensure a therapist with whom you engage in teletherapy is working within the state law guidelines and their board guidelines. I offer teletherapy and it works well, especially for parent consultation or when someone is out of town.
A teenage brain is not an adult brain. Therefore, counseling with a teenager requires a therapist who understands the differences and knows how to work with those differences. Teens are often not talkative with adults and respond better to experiential exercises, sand tray work, art, and games. All of these modalities elicit hidden root causes of their behavioral or emotional issues more efficiently than talking alone. Sometimes, for teens to feel safe to establish the relationship with the therapist, it’s important for the teen to share what interests and excites them. This might include:
- their music collection
- car magazines
- video games
- a picture of their boyfriend or girlfriend.
Teen counseling requires meeting the teen where they are developmentally and with their interests in mind.
Signs of positive mental health and wellbeing include:
- Low stress much of the time
- Feeling physically well
- Having good, strong, intimate relationships
- Experiencing work satisfaction
- Work/life balance
Mindfulness is a technique that can help promote mental health and wellbeing. Mindfulness is defined as:
“being fully aware of your experience moment-to-moment with judgement of the need to change the experience”.
The definition says it all. First, being fully aware of your experience’ suggests being in your experience (using your senses to the fullest) and not in your head worrying, ruminating, or beating yourself up mentally. It’s easy to see how this contributes to better mental health; it reduces stress, frees you to be in your relationships, to find work satisfaction and to notice when you are out of balance.
Second, ‘without judgment or need to change your experience’ is about letting go of having to decide whether something is right or wrong, good or bad for you at any given moment. This reduces stress and improves the quality of all experiences.
We are biologically wired to care for each other. It keeps our species alive. When children are lovingly cared for by their caregivers, compassion arises naturally. It is also true that experiences can prevent compassion from developing or take it from us. Examples include:
- Being the victim of a violent crime,
- Witnessing the suffering of others to the point of compassion fatigue,
- Being treated poorly by a friend, coworker, store clerk,
- Having parents who are incapable of meeting our basic needs in infancy,
- Being busy and stressed, always hurrying,
- Living in our head making us unaware of what’s happening to others around us.
Mindfulness is the act of quieting the mind’s active ‘hijacking’ and, instead, staying in our experience – our lives. When we aren’t thinking ahead, ruminating, worrying, regretting which is all mind activity, we are able to notice what’s happening around us in the moment and be aware with the capacity to respond with our natural compassion.
There is quality research that indicates many benefits of incorporating mindfulness at work. A few include:
- Fewer sick days
- Better focus on tasks
- Improved problem-solving skills
- Better ability to think’ outside the box’
- Better work relationships
- Improved conflict-resolution skills
In addition, we also know that mindfulness is a more pleasant experience than mindlessness. We spend a lot of time at work; don’t we deserve to enjoy it?
Simply defined, mindfulness is: “being fully present moment-to-moment in your experience without judgment” (Jon Kabat-Zinn). Here are some examples:
- You’re standing in line at the grocery store
- Mindless:
-
- Irritation because it’s taking too long
- You’re thinking about how many things you have to get done before you go to bed
- You’re upset and replaying an interaction you had with a friend that didn’t go well
-
- Mindless:
-
- Mindful:
- Aware that you’re tensing your body in resistance to standing in line
- You breathe to calm your body and de-stress
- You take the time to look around and notice the little child playfully interacting with his mother and smell of the cookies on display
- Mindful:
- You’ve just been told your project needs reworking
- Mindless:
- Anger arises, you feel defensive
- Thoughts of what you’d like to say to the boss runs through your mind
- You grab a bag of chips to soothe yourself
- You berate yourself for not doing it better in the first place
- Mindless:
-
- Mindful:
- You notice anger and by staying with that emotion you realize you are hurt by a feeling of inadequacy
- You remind yourself that no-one gets everything right all the time and recognize that your boss wasn’t upset or critical so you don’t need to take it personally
- You spend a moment settling yourself by slowing your breath and when you feel better, you go to your desk to take a look at the project again
- Mindful: