Relational Counseling in Seattle
for Individuals and Couples

The challenge of the counseling process:

The most common ailments presented in counseling are depression, anxiety, and relationship difficulties. These symptoms cause turmoil and dissatisfaction in a life, and the turmoil causes the symptoms. They feed on each other. If the underlying cause is not effectively addressed in counseling, and even if the symptom is removed with medication or some behavior modification, another symptom will eventually manifest. Unfortunately, this new manifestation may be a grander version of the original, or something else just as debilitating. Our counseling addresses the cause, and as a result, the symptom (the problem) no longer exists.

The underlying cause is emotional pain. This core pain (along with other memories) is embedded in the “implicit memory,” which is a collection of emotional memories from previous, meaningful life situations, and is stored in the limbic brain. It may be a feeling of delight and joy from when a father peers into his baby’s eyes with love and caring. It could be dread, shock, and fear upon learning a mother has to be away from home due to an illness. This limbic brain stores what it experiences in emotions and pictorial memories.

When a significant emotional experience occurs, the stored emotional memories come flooding in and give the impression they are exclusively in response to the present moment. In the counseling setting, this occurrence is the opportunity to face and heal the pain through the therapeutic emotional connection. The primary skill of the relational counselor is to create the emotional safety which allows for core emotions, both pleasant and unpleasant, to be revealed, felt, and appreciated.

Many types of counseling are at best minimally effective and at least re-traumatizing. Unless the client experiences this implicit memory, he or she is simply scratching the surface. This may not be so harmful, but if the client does happen to tap into the painful, core emotions and does not know how to manage and embrace the feelings then the trauma may be greater than previously.