Personal Conflict Resolution Classes
Schedule and Details

A World of Therapies

You can have what you need.

The therapist delivers something to you that you don’t have, ensures you have it, and then becomes unnecessary. The coach helps improve your routine. Their role ends naturally as your path becomes clear.

As a therapist, I provide the tools to clarify your path and, in so doing, turn therapy into coaching.

Your problems are guides.

Your difficulties reflect the strengths you need. There is something valuable to be learned in every problem.

I teach, guide, and protect. I follow your directions. I have many resources but you are ultimately the brains behind the operation.

Look beyond what’s normal. Struggle is a door to opportunity. Your change will also benefit many others. Make that choice.

Preparation is the odd combination of seeing new goals and recognizing old baggage. Reaching for novelty while letting go of convention puts you in a compromised state of mind. This may be where you are stuck.

Therapy is learning but learning is not what you’ve been taught. Learning is error and exploration driven by courage, curiosity, need, and inspiration. You may feel unsuccessful but you are never wrong.

Putting things back together is just as important as discovering how to change. We spend as much time settling your new mind as finding your new methods. It’s not enough to be willing, you must be able.

Making Change

Many paths with a common goal.

We are creatures of habit. We adopt habits to make life easier because we can’t think through every situation anew. Our whole life is based on habits of perception, thought, action, and association. These grow together like a jigsaw puzzle, or like ivy growing on a trellis. It becomes difficult to change one thing without changing all the others.

If you’re looking for change, be open to making change broadly. The one thing that prevents improvement is attachment to those things you feel protect and reward you. These are the thoughts, recreations, and people you depend on. All of these relationships exert a force to keep you from changing. Your change might threaten everything around you. Be committed to a greater you.

Change requires courage. You are not heading toward what’s familiar and success is not assured. Learning involves making mistakes, cracking the shell, and seeing anew. These are just the things our habits were designed to prevent.

Change involves retraining, and the most important mechanisms are your mind, body, spirit, and the way your brain works. Reason, exercise, emotion, relationship, environment, inspiration, focus, attention, and basic executive function are all things that you can change. When you change for the better, all that you’re connected to will also change for the better.

stoller-button

Psychotherapy

Common Issues:

Anxiety and Fear

Anxiety is a broad state of hypervigilance that affects your mood and thoughts. We always see our vigilance motivated by issues outside ourselves but these triggers, while part of the problem, are rarely part of the solution.

Anxiety is the combination of what sets you off and how you react. You have little power in changing the triggers, some power in changing the situation, and the most power in changing your reaction.

We are encountering new triggers: the pandemic, the ecology, hostility, and alienation. It’s not just you and you don’t need to be swept away. It’s society’s reaction to becoming more aware and more intelligent.

Depression and Sadness

Depression is both an action and a reaction. Where it’s a reaction we can look at the cause. Where it’s an action, consider what it’s telling you and how to work with it. Don’t reject any part of you.

Depression has roots in your emotional spirit, intellectual mind, and neurological brain. Explore your feelings, examine your thoughts, and train your brain. Like heartbreak, depression can be a divine and cleansing thing. Nothing is static. “Normal” is whatever you make it to be.

Your mind and body need balance. It’s like having a rudder. Once you understand how to create balance you cannot forget it.

Attention Disorders

I‘ve written extensively about the fallacy of ADD/ADHD in children where the diagnosis is misused as a tool to suppress natural learning. For a large majority of children, the diagnosis of ADD/ADHD stems from emotional conflicts in their environment.

A minority of children diagnosed with ADD/ADHD suffer from a lack of regulation. Dysregulation characterizes the diagnosis for most adults.

The remedy for executive dysregulation is not intellectual or emotional but neurological. When you learn to readjust your brain, your attention, perception, and conceptual abilities change. This can be accomplished with a combination of brain training and awareness. When you change your tuning your mind plays in a different key.

Emotional Disorders

Emotions are feelings that reflect the sum of your experience. They include all that you’ve decided upon and all that you cannot figure out. When we’re healthy they organize like layers of water, and our personality floats on top of them.

Disturbances, like storms, cause waves and obscurity, and possibly foundering and chaos. When emotional disorder is chronic our boat is swamped and, like sailors who can’t swim, we’ll climb on top of anything that floats.

Learning to swim is good, but becoming a dolphin is better. You cannot ignore your emotions and you do not control them. Learn to dive and swim among them. Emotional regulation is not something you’ll find in your intellect, you’ll find it in your body.

Sleep Disorders

30% of the population suffers from a lack of sleep and most are so used to it that they don’t do much about it. Most insomnia is misunderstood as the inability to relax. The real cause is your poor neurological response to your environment.

Learning to change your thought patterns and brain rhythms is not hard if you make the effort. My clients who monitor their sleep report an improvement of between 30 to 50% and restoration of adequate sleep.

Learn to control your brainwaves. This sets the tone for your thoughts and feelings. Learn to support your circadian rhythms. Poor sleeping skills reflect poor living skills which explain why few people make progress. Improving your sleep improves everything.

Relationships

Less than 10% of what you mean is communicated in words but from body signals and your behavior. You’re hardly aware of most of what you’re broadcasting.

Repairing relationships is about realigning, reattaching, and creating an alliance. All parties much create a landing pad of authenticity, integrity, and sincerity. You don’t need to know exactly what you feel, and what you feel does not need to be entirely aligned with what you think, but you do have to speak for all your feelings.

What’s unspoken dominates the relationship. Unless you’re exploring these areas you’re not authentically representing yourselves. The success of any relationship rests on sincere, shared commitment to the present and future.

Children and Parents

Our childhood is where our hearts were forged. Childhood is a different world that has different needs and boundaries. You cannot understand a young person as you do an adult. Their hearts and minds are different.

Adults must provide their children with understanding, and support. Your children are your legacy and the carriers of your connection to wisdom and ancestry. They are your evolution.

There is too much to learn and too much to resolve for there to be strife between parents and children. Even minor acts of abuse perpetuate or create suffering.

As we grow our creative powers weaken and we become constrained. The family is the foundry of self-esteem and purpose. Childhood is the crucible. Parents must support the emergence of spirit for children to connect to their potential.

Struggles at Work and of Purpose

Your self-esteem is rooted in how you value and spend your time. The majority of us are taught a need to prove ourselves and to earn our sense of value. But as most work lacks meaning, most workers feel a lack of value.

If you have self-respect and lack a sense of value, then your work lacks purpose. If you don’t have self-respect, then you don’t know the meaning of purpose. It’s you that lacks purpose.

There is probably a bit of both. Most of us lack our own sense of value and our work does not makes up for this.

Find and follow what’s valuable in yourself and others. Succeeding at this will change your life and the lives of those around you. Expect others will resist you because you will awaken their own dissatisfaction.

States of Mind and Body

Our state of mind defines everything we see or think and we take it for granted. We believe we exist in a rational and stable world and are frightened when this is threatened. What we call “normal” is a state of shared illusions.

We accept the poorly grounded thoughts and actions, losing touch with ourselves and the variations in others. Recognizing and explaining our reality to others is an essential part of understanding ourselves and each other.

Your emotionally charged states blow through you like changing weather. Your relationship with your body is built on perception, sensation, projection, and imagination. You can change these.

Physical Health

You play an essential role in all healing. Your body sends you messages most of which you either can’t hear, don’t understand or ignore. These messages may tell you what to do, but they may also tell you what to think or how to feel.

Western medicine says the body is mechanical and the doctor responds mechanically. Eastern medicine says the body is energetic and the physician is intuitive.  I believe you have intuitive powers that you are not using.

Many people contribute to their disease without knowing it. When the mind is sad the body cries tears of illness. Inflammation, dysregulation, and over-reaction are typical auto-immune responses controlled by your brain and gut.

Anger, Shame, and Low Self-Esteem

Anger is thrust into you, shame is beat into you, and low self-esteem is starved into you. Habitual degradation is a habit you sustain by believing the exploitation inflicted on you. Recover by recognizing how you sabotage yourself.

Shame comes from abuse by those you loved and needed. We are wired to love our parents even when they abuse us. As children we had unconditional love for our parents and perhaps also for partners who did not deserve it.

Because we feel responsible, we project failure on ourselves. Do you whitewash the failures of those you’ve loved? Recognize the horrendous failure of others and the goodness in yourself.

Recovering love for yourself is a journey through a world of sorrow where your beauty lies. I can help you find it, but I will not help you avoid it.

Trauma and PTSD

Childhood trauma is repressed and incorporated into our personality. We may not dwell on it, but the scars still define us. Most of us aim to cope rather than remove the scars.

You can regain power by removing old trauma and discarding the need to cope. This does not require re-experiencing the sorrow, it is a process of remembering and forgetting.

With PTSD your trauma remains exposed and you are still reacting to it. Even here, you don’t need to relive the experience, you need only release what you are attached to.

There are as many approaches to their release as there are ways of storing your injury. You are looking to relax, release, and return to a balance that is neural, cognitive, emotional, spiritual, and physical.

Grief

The death of close relations is our greatest source of grief. Modern society has hidden aging, infirmity, and death. There is little chance for people of any age to learn the process of death and dying. The medicalizing of death has disempowered families and disabled individuals. You cannot sanitize loss.

According to our traditions, death is a family affair. The family learns with and from each other the meanings of old age, infirmity, and death. Grief is natural and healthy and contributes to the foundation of our sense of self and family.

Grief is a spiritual component of seeing the whole of life. The death of another is a recognition of the potential for change, work to be done, honoring what was accomplished, committing to remember and to carry forward the power of those we loved.

Mortality and Vitality

Aging and illness ask us how we’ve been living and what we’re living for. When I got out of Intensive Care for Covid-19 I was hell-bent on being productive. There were things I could do even during recovery and I wasted no time.

Age will sneak up on you if you don’t pay attention. Have a bucket list that will make you work. Do what’s vital. The more visionary, unlikely, or even impossible the better. Find and take risks. Be creative and committed. The energy that springs from your heart will not dry up.

Aim high. Of course there will be resistance. Out-do yourself. Regardless of your age or the choices you have, you always have the choice of doing more of what’s meaningful. Never stop planning, never stop moving. Always have something on the drawing board.

stoller-button