My approach is to be genuine, intuitively receptive, and collaborative. My energy in the room is soulful, steady, and nurturing. I put myself at my clients level so that there is a sense of safety, acceptance, and teamwork rather than hierarchy. I find that hopefulness and healing tend to happen from the very first counseling session. As a therapist, my first priority is to make sure that my client’s specific needs are being met, whether that be spiritual growth, relationship healing and growth, self-healing and growth, or all of these things. After all, they do tend to overlap.
One of my strengths is my ability to help my clients move beyond the patterns of being stuck in or triggered by past emotional wounds by learning learning valuable self healing techniques and relational skills. I use a blend of mindfulness (including guided visualizations), somatic and experiential techniques such as breath work, grounding, chakra clearing, body check ins, Emotional Freedom Technique (self tapping), Conscious love (inspired by John Welwood), Conscious Parenting, (inspired by Shefali Tsbary), and Soul work/Shadow work, inspired by Carl Jung, Thomas Moore, and David Richo.
In my own personal life I have benefited tremendously from learning to walk a path of mindfulness, conscious romantic love, conscious parenting, and shadow work. When I know it will help, my clients will hear one of my own real life examples of how I have worked through my old stories and fears and how I have healed and transformed. We all need a little inspiration sometimes, especially when we are in a place of despair. These are the gems that I can help you discover. I find that woven together, these practices allow us to walk a path led by divine love and light. Here, we learn how to allow our own inner light to embrace our shadow, our inner darkness in all of it’s pain and fear, and all of it’s hidden strength and beauty.
We learn to face our fears by embracing our pain. Then, we track the deeper story behind the pain and the mood of un-love that we keep circling back to. Realizing from our new perspective, that this story that we are “unlovable” or “not good enough” or “not beautiful enough” is not true, we can then rewrite these self-limiting, pain provoking stories.
We can get creative and passionate in this self-healing, and weave self-care and self-nurturing into our lives. We can think of soul expressive activities such as dancing or gardening or playing music and create daily and weekly practices. We can incorporate chakra clearing into our lives to help release us from the old stories, to help us in the healing of our core wounds. This is a path of continuous awakening and growth, and one that our own soul is longing for us to embrace as it tugs at our heart, and cries out in frustration and pain at this old, old, familiar story. When we begin to step out of those stories, little, much needed earthquakes happen, shifts happen, deeper meaning happens, even deeper pain might happen from time to time. But this deep pain eventually transforms into epiphanies, self-healing, relationship healing, and a deeper experience of love.
Blessings!
Christine Dufond, MFT