Your center for
support | Wisdom | understanding
Creating sacred space for healing within
broken communities, broken relationships, and broken hearts.
about us
-
We are a community of therapists that believes in looking at the whole person - mind, body and soul and the systems that we live in - economic, social, relational. We want to expand the conversation of what healing can look like.
In working with us - we invite you to encounter your own life, connect to your story, create change where you can and practice compassion toward yourself.
-
We have moments where what we need is to sit with our story and find threads of meaning, patterns and to listen to our own wisdom.
We have times where we need a witness to our lives - a deep holding place where we can be fully seen and heard.
Our world is full of experiences that isolate, traumatize and confuse us. It is natural to find ourselves feeling lonely, adrift, hurt and struggling.
The Pastoral Center for Healing is made up of therapists who know that we are not meant to go through these hard times alone.
-
We do not promise the quick fix. We believe that healing takes place in relationships - to self, to others, to our community, to our world and to what brings us meaning.
We hope to help you create the space and safety to discover and explore and co-create what brings you meaning, healing and connection.
We can’t wait to meet you and hear your story.
-
Counseling
Pastoral counseling continues an ancient tradition of care that, in the Christian form, has been called the 'care of souls'. The primary task of pastoral counseling is to aid persons in finding their footing, in reclaiming and articulating the deep meanings that ground their lives and that must constitute the fundamental resource for addressing whatever personal crisis may have led them into counseling.
-
Supervision
The Pastoral Center for Healing seeks to facilitate the pursuit of excellence in people preparing for ministries of pastoral care, for clinical pastoral therapy, and for other forms of psychotherapy and clinical work. We are an excellent resource for clinicians of all types who are seeking to increase overall competence in their professional practices.
our commitments
At the Pastoral Center for Healing, we are committed to the historical care of souls tradition. By “soul,” we are not referring to a mysterious core inside human beings, or some sort of specter that inhabits the body. Rather, soul encompasses everything that makes us human—mind, body, and spirit. Basically, soul is the fabric that connects us to ourselves, to others, to our communities and societies, to the earth, and to the Eternal. Our souls are healthy and vibrant when we inhabit a relational web that embodies care, compassion, appreciation, and understanding.
The various forms of psychological distress arise whenever there are disturbances in this fabric—either when we are disconnected and isolated; when the fabric we occupy is afflicted by trauma, neglect, or hatred; or when there is a lack of understanding and respect for our particular individuality. The healing of these forms of distress occurs whenever this connective fabric is restored. Often this means learning to relate to ourselves and others in more truthful yet compassionate ways.
Just as often, this may involve being empowered to join with others in working for constructive changes in our families, communities, and even our larger social world. We understand the counseling relationship as a node within this web of interconnection, a place where this healing can begin or gain traction, a place from which we might be enabled to unite with healing efforts occurring in our world. Psychotherapy, in other words, is essentially a healing relationship.
our commitments
At the Pastoral Center for Healing, we are committed to the recovery and renewal of talk therapy. Unfortunately, this is not the dominant approach to psychological distress and psychotherapy in the United States today. The prevailing doctrine of psychological suffering is grounded in a medical model that sees these forms of distress as discrete, diagnosable disorders that are rooted solely in brain chemistry, neurological pathways, genetics, and personal cognitive-behavioral habits.
Even when such distress is believed to originate in trauma or early family experiences, these are still thought to cause suffering by altering the brain or shaping personal habits of thinking or behavior. The problem, in any case, is presently located inside the individual. According to this view, psychotherapy is reduced to a set of specific techniques, or “empirically-supported treatments,” often paired with psychoactive medications, aimed at reducing or eliminating symptoms, rather than being a genuine engagement with whole persons in their social environments.
This does not mean our counselors are not trained in recent treatment approaches, or that we never utilize specific contemporary techniques, or that we discourage the use of potentially helpful medications. What it does mean is that the healing relationship must come first, and other resources or techniques are integrated into this therapeutic bond, with your full collaboration, participation, and agreement.
