About Beacon Therapy
Imagine that you are a sailor.
The sea is where you always want to be. It’s thrilling and beautiful. It’s where you live life to the fullest.
You’ve even managed tough weather before, making you love even more the sense of life the sea brings.
This time, though, the storm is bigger than you’ve ever faced.
The tempest breaks.
Wind, rain, and sea combine into an inky blackness that seeps away at your confidence and hope. Growing waves fuel your growing despair, and all your knowledge of how to steer your ship seems to evaporate.
In a panic, you try to remember what worked before, pushing and pulling at the boat randomly, but things worsen. As gigantic waves begin crashing on you, threatening to pull you under, you finally decide to reach for the radio and call for help.
“Mayday, mayday.” Static – Your despair rises.
Finally, you see a small light…
It’s blinking between waves, and your radio crackles, “I hear your signal. I’m on the shore. Can you see my light?”
You respond, “Yes, I see you! But I can’t get my boat to go in the right direction. Everything I’ve tried doesn’t work.”
“I can’t steer your ship for you, but I promise I’m going to stay with you and tell you how.”
You begin to get directions. Some make total sense and remind you of what you did before that worked.
Others feel new and unfamiliar. They take several tries to get down correctly, but the person on the shore is patient and calm and keeps their promise to stay with you.
Slowly but steadily, you get your boat facing the right direction and moving closer to the light.
Finding Hope
As you keep at it, you realize you are getting more comfortable navigating again, and you begin to feel the first sense of calm and control in what seems like a lifetime.
Even with the storm still raging about you, you have hope and confidence that you’ll make it.
Beacon Therapy
At Beacon Therapy of Utah, we strive to provide the light on the shore and be the calm, soothing voice of direction, especially since we’ve experienced our storms and appreciated the “beacons” that helped us.
We primarily work with individuals (teens and adults) struggling with…
- isolation, over-control, panic, and lack of connection with others after significant trauma;
- depression, anxiety, and feeling undervalued by family and work, and scared to see the good in their life eroding;
- loneliness and despair following death and hopelessness of ever finding happiness after loss;
- and anxiety, stress, worry, lack of self-esteem, and not feeling in control of emotions in response to social pressures at work or school and with peers.
Beginning Our Work Together…
Whether through a phone call or email, we want you to feel safe, heard, and start building a sense of hope as we start our work together. Making sure that one of our licensed clinicians is the best fit for you is a high priority at Beacon Therapy. That’s why we offer a free consultation to give you the chance to speak with a member of our team and see how the experience working with us will feel.
In your first session, we’ll take some time getting to know more about you and the main problems bringing you to therapy. We also want you to feel free to ask questions about us and why we do what we do.
Then, we’ll coordinate together to create a plan of action. We initially recommend to our clients that we meet weekly. As you begin to feel confident and safe in your ability to “steer the boat” on your own, we can discuss how often we meet to best suit your needs.
A little about our approach…
It’s about YOU.
Our approach is to always focus on what you want to happen in your life. We can’t read minds and don’t know everything .
That’s why it’s so important to us that we check in with you each step of the way to make sure we’re staying on track and working on what you think is important. We are HUGE proponents of two main ideas with therapy:
1) You can only change YOU.
That’s all that’s within your control! It’s important to hear about your experiences with others and even times when others seem to think irrationally, but we’m always going to bring us back to the question, “So what can YOU do about it?”
That question means that sometimes we’ll help you learn how to handle when someone else is irrational, and sometimes we’ll help you identify when (dare we say it?) you are irrational. Then, we’ll practice what you might need to do or think differently to help you be successful and happy.
2) Your work OUTSIDE of session is what will lead to lasting change.
We can compare therapy to having a trainer at the gym. The trainer’s job is to teach you the exercises and make corrections when something is wrong.
But if your only effort on building muscle was once a week with the trainer, you’re never gonna walk out of the gym looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger (or Liam Hemsworth for the younger people out there.)
Your progress in therapy depends on the work you do outside of therapy on the things we’ll discuss each week. Our clinicians are on the shore giving directions, but you must steer your boat.
Humor increases happiness.
Finally, we feel it’s important that the natural tendency toward humor comes through during sessions. Humor has made our clients more comfortable and helps them have more buy-in to what we suggest when we combine our genuine concern and empathy for them with some appropriate lightheartedness.
One person we worked with reported they appreciated we didn’t make light of their situation, but we helped them feel lighter.
Sometimes, it’s easier to remember how to be happy (or maybe learn for the first time) when we’re around others who are happy, and we hope to bring that to the table for those with whom we work.
About Me
A desire to help others started early.
I have had the joy of connecting with and helping others since I was little, and I think that is what prompted me to go into the mental health field (well, that and because cardigans are my preferred business attire).
I enjoy the current work I do immensely. To get here, some of my benchmarks include a B.A. in Psychology and a Master’s in Social Work (MSW), both from BYU. I am a currently licensed LCSW in Utah and have completed training in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing).
Nature, Family, Travel, and Food
I grew up in Eastern Idaho with a strong love of the outdoors. That said, while I love hiking, camping, and the occasional fishing, I figured a picture of me in my true natural habitat would probably give you the most accurate impression of me. (Don’t worry, I can still tie a clinch knot if the situation demands!)
When I’m not reading or hanging out with Jolene (the lovely lady pictured with me), I am an impulsive traveler (usually deciding to go on a road trip an hour before leaving) and enjoy being with friends and family.
I’m a firm believer that all gatherings are better when food is included (which is probably why that belief is the only thing firm about me… everything else is a bit flabby). I avoid the gym like the plague, but I get exercise and sunshine in the mountains or by trying to develop a green thumb in my garden. (It’s still a work in progress.)