Fighting to changes the material conditions around us can be disheartening and exhausting. Fighting powerful actors can arouse anxiety and leave us feeling deeply unsafe. Nurturing mental health while active in social movements is challenging. But it is possible with the right support.
Therapists too often focus on helping people develop the strength and wellness needed to better navigate the
conditions we live under. However, we need not only to heal as individuals in order to better withstand the conditions that shape our daily existence, but also to transform these conditions to create a more livable world.
Therapists need to understand and be responsive to these and other priorities and commitments that many of our clients bring to therapy, in order to effectively support their mental health.
Together we will sit with and explore the challenges and contradictions of fighting oppressive systems and actors. I will support you to find ways of fighting back that restore your sense of power and wholeness. I will be present with your grief when the work you are doing feels impossible. I will support you to cultivate authentic faith that the vision you hold is possible and worth fighting for.
Anxiety can be overwhelming. Anxiety can take control of our thoughts and disrupt our capacity to experience joy and pleasure. However, with the right support, you can live with anxiety rather than living under its power. We will work together to understand your anxiety better--what triggers it, and what it needs to soften and release.
I will work with you to explore different ways you can relate to anxiety - different choices available to you. When anxiety begins to rise within you, does it respond to compassionate attempts to soothe it back down with mantras or patterned breathing? Or, is its more effective to follow the energy of your anxiety up to an apex with movement, so that it may then fall back down under its own weight?
Invisible to others, chronic pain can consume vast amounts of our mental and emotional energy, while narrowing the possibilities that feel available to us. Chronic pain can evoke fears about the future ("how bad will this get 10 years from now?"). Chronic pain can make it hard to feel compassion and warmth, toward ourselves and others. With the right support, you can change your relationship to the experience of pain, while fortifying the parts of yourself your pain is attacking.
Seeing a therapist for support with chronic pain does not mean your pain is in your head. Your pain is real, in your body. And, the thoughts and feelings your pain arouses within you can impact the ways you experience it, in your body. I cannot take your pain away, but I can support you to understand your pain better, and I can support you to explore new ways you could relate to your pain in order to shift the ways it impacts. When needed, I will simply be present for you and the pain you experience, which for most of your waking hours you have to hold alone.
William Ruhm LICSW