Marriage & Family Therapy, Tell Your Friends!

It's official! I am up and ready for business as a Marriage and Family Therapist!!

I am moonlighting to start after my full time job at YV, just a couple of nights a week at my private office at The Hunt Club in Gallatin, TN.  It is just over the Hendersonville line, about 3 miles from our home.

I am so excited to finally be able to do my own thing and start drumming up some business.  

NOW, I need your help! If you know of friends or family or anyone in the great Sumner/Davidson County area needing some therapy, share the love and give them my name and number.

I specialize in a few areas....

1. Teenagers/Children: Having worked with this population for over 6 years now at Youth Villages, I have ample experience in helping families with behavior modification and working with the family system as a whole for improvement.  Regarding teenagers, like it or not, God has blessed me to work with this population of kids! They wear me out and confuse us all, but I know this is my first calling.  I may not have experienced some of the traumatic things they have, but I have that capacity to genuinely care about them and they sense that, and starting with rapport alone, we are able to move mountains.

2. Marriages/Pre-Marital/Pre-Engagement:  I LOVE relationships. Before I was married I read every christian/secular relationship book there was. I personally feel that everything we are connected to is at the very least relational.  That was the main reason I chose the Marriage and Family Therapy route in graduate school.  Since then I have worked with several couples and individuals with marital stressors and divorce recovery, and pre-marital counseling.  I am trained and certified to administer the Prepare/Enrich pre-marital/marriage assessment to help couples identify areas of stress or potential stress in their marriage and help provide them with tools to improve their collaboration with one another to have the healthiest marriage possible.  My marriage is definitely not perfect, but if anything, Stephen and I went to good premarital counseling and learned how to fight FAIR and why NOT to push those all too sensitive buttons that we all have.  Marriage is about selflessness and unfortunately we, as humans, are selfish by nature.  It is a constant effort against our natural instincts to act in ways of selflessness in our marriage.

3. Trauma: I am newly trained in EMDR therapy, Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing.  EMDR has been known to effectively treat PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and other big traumas, such as sexual and physical abuse, as well as the natural "life" traumas that we all experience, such as bullying as a child, the overwhelming feeling of "not being good enough," etc.  If there is a common misbelief you have about yourself, something you might experience now, like the tightening of your throat, or trimmers, or that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach when you talk about a difficulty you have faced...that is your body's way of saying you have not healed from that experience.  Imagine being able to talk about that difficult family situation, or work problem, or relationship from your past that has always had a grip on you, with confidence, ease, and most of all, peace in knowing that it no longer disturbs you?  It's POWERFUL stuff!  I personally have had it done to me and was amazed at the power of this treatment. 

What is it you might wonder??  Well, your brain has a way of processing information from your right to your left hemispheres.  Your right brain, is the emotional side, that often gets stunted when a trauma or disturbance occurs in your life, so it never transmits to the left brain, the rational, logical side.  That's why you feel "stuck" on some things.  The memory is literally stuck and not completely processed.  25+ years of supported research has shown that through bilateral stimulation, such as eye movements, or sounds, or taps, that your brain calms it's responsiveness and is able to finish processing the painful memories you have.  Check out the website for more information...   http://www.emdr.com/briefdes.htm Ultimately, it's like this....  YOU are like a glass of ice water....  the water is your life experiences and the ice are the blocked memories and trauma that still have an effect on you.  EMDR is what melts that ice and lets the trauma finish processing into your life experiences without the feelings and emotions that often controlled those thoughts.

That's a lot of information, I know... But I needed to type it out in my words because unless you like reading about therapy and other things...the literature would bore you to tears!

So refer refer refer!!  I am sharing office space with the incredible Mr. Floyd Dawson, LPC and looking forward to building a small practice of my own!

If you don't have my phone number, email me at MattersoftheHeartTN@gmail.com  and I can give you or your contacts more information. 

Fee's are on a sliding scale, based on your income and the number in your family, ranging from $35-$95/hour. 

Thanks Friends for passing the word along!!

Joanna Dixon, MMFT  :)