Individual Counseling
Are you feeling small, unimportant, misunderstood?
Do you feel like you can’t continue life as it is?
Sometimes life can feel like a series of many lives. Choices. Some good. Some not so good. Most moving toward a picture that isn’t what you imagined for your life.
Do you show up one way with your job, home, family, loved ones?
Living life can be complex and confusing.
Relationships are involved, addictions can get in the way, memories from childhood haunt, painful bodily symptoms from old trauma, old strategies for how to deal with anxiety, depression, and fear can hinder more than help, conflict within the areas of life can all tumble around leaving us feeling cornered. Unseen. Unloved. Maybe even so futile that we’d rather not wake up to do life.
You’re trying so hard to make life work for others and for yourself.
Counseling can help. You can find more freedom as you wrestle to understand who you are, how you’ve been trained to show up, and how you want to intention to live.
How to Begin
​Let’s begin the journey and move toward how you want to live life.
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Schedule an Appointment or Call
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We can connect to see if we’re a fit and if so, schedule.
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First session we will complete paperwork, get to know one another, and talk through your goals.
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Invite all of you to the table
gayle english, LMHC, LPC
I grew up with a deeply held belief that I was not as important (as a woman) as the men who I was made to support and “care” for. We attended church but were not a religious family. This deeply held belief of mine was more about women having less equality than men. I spent years performing and being what I needed to be for other people to feel important. These years were empty and deeply lonely and yet I couldn’t even offer myself the space to acknowledge that truth. As I began to see how I had spent so many years of my life, there was deep shame, regret, fear, and hopelessness. My own counselor helped me see what I was feeling and begin to name what I needed. Now I help others do the same.
I’ve been hurt deeply. In different stages of life, I have held grudges for decades (with and without knowing). The pain hurt so bad but I could not let go of what I was carrying in my body. Sometimes I would offer forgiveness, believing that’s what I was giving, only to find that I hadn’t named well what had happened. How can you forgive something that wasn’t named? Clarity needs to happen in the naming before we can move to let it go.
Without clarity, we find ourselves asking, "Where am I? and "How did I get here?" I needed to understand my story, what I believed to be true about me, how I had been hurt, and how I had hurt others intentionally and unintentionally.
I have learned and am learning to offer forgiveness to my own heart. I get to parent the younger parts of me I have exiled and hated. I have invited them to have a place at the table. Come and join me here. The journey is slow, and yet, I choose to stay. I choose not to look away in the face of darkness. I want to offer the goodness that I have received from God and from my tribe. The greatest gift I have received is the gift of being seen and delighted in.
I am holding out hope for you. I believe in you. I trust your voice. I am holding out an olive branch to you. Let’s wander in the maze of your life as we invite all of you back to the table.
If you have been hurt or are hurting, let's begin the journey toward clarity and healing.
When despair grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light.
For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.