Laurie Maddox

Depression is a natural part of life but when it starts to overtake us we may need more support to process through the grief to let it go and release it. Depression is often internalized anger or the unprocessed losses and our sadness related to those losses. Coping with depression sometimes means sitting with our pain first and facing our shadow before we are able to gain momentum again.

Trauma is part of the lives of most people as a normal part of being human. Many of us have witnessed violence or lived through being verbal, emotional or sexual abuse during childhood, adolescence or even as adults. PTSD is not just a diagnosis for veterans of war. I offer counseling for traumatic memories or a pattern of abuse to help you heal and move away from the fears and grief from these experiences so you can make peace with the past.

Many of us have doubts about ourselves and whether we are loveable or likable. We often question what we have to offer the world, or feel defective and carry within a profound sense of shame. Being able to see ourselves honestly and radically accept where we are, allows us to begin to adopt a more compassionate self-attitude. Cultivating unconditional love and self-acceptance is an essential part of the path to wholeness, psychological maturity, and spiritual evolution.

Transpersonal Therapy is about understanding your life through an archetypal lens. Looking at life as an arc toward individuation throughout the life span for deeper self-understanding and the cultivation of character. The purpose of resolving core conflicts, confronting our shadow and resolving highly charged complexes helps us reach self-understanding and create meaning by viewing the story of our lives as a collective story of our shared humanity.

Internal Family Systems helps us to understand the deep emotional wounds that cause us to feel stuck or protective over certain aspects of self that get split off when traumatic emotional events occur, often in childhood and early development. We must first bring in these splintered parts or self-states that need healing into the larger self- concept. Integrating these parts helps us to accept these disowned aspects of self, and regain a sense of emotional safety in the world.

Psychoanalytic work is the basis for much of psychotherapy and helps us to identify the internal motivations that drive behavior. Psychoanalytic psychotherapy is about making the unconscious mental processes, more conscious. It is about bringing increased awareness to aggressive or sexual impulses, or any unwanted behaviors by understanding their unconscious underpinnings. Self-reflection and contemplating one's own inner life is a way of gaining access to fears or deeper internal conflicts.