Home

Welcome!

At some point, in all of our lives
we decide
that we must take time to reflect,
to gain some insight,
to talk to someone about how
we are feeling.
Perhaps it takes a crisis,
a lifestyle change,
a relationship,
or stressful career situation
to recognize
and consider our feelings seriously.

Vanessa McAdams-Mahmoud, LCSW

What We Offer

We like to help individuals gain a deeper understanding about themselves in a meaningful way through individual counseling and psychotherapy.

We also offer couples or relationship counseling for people at any stage of their relationship--- dating, premarital, marital and divorce/separation or reconciliation.

All interventions are individually designed for your needs and particular circumstances and summarized in a treatment contract uniquely developed for you.

The Way that can be trodden is not the enduring and
unchanging Way. The name that can be named is not the enduring and
unchanging name.

(Conceived of as) having no name, it is the Originator of heaven
and earth; (conceived of as) having a name, it is the Mother of all
things.

Always without desire we must be found,
If its deep mystery we would sound;
But if desire always within us be,
Its outer fringe is all that we shall see.

Under these two aspects, it is really the same; but as development
takes place, it receives the different names. Together we call them
the Mystery. Where the Mystery is the deepest is the gate of all that
is subtle and wonderful.

Tao Te Ching: Lao Tzu, as translated by Legge

Check out our Blog!

http://vanessamahmoud.wordpress.com

Staying The Course:
Psychotherapy In The African-American Community

By Janis Sanchez-Hucles

African-Americans are appropriately cautious about seeking mental health services. Historically, those individuals who sought services were pathologized, overmedicated, given long-term and inpatient treatment, rather than outpatient treatment, and were exposed to insensitive therapists who did not believe African-Americans could benefit from verbal therapy. Like other potential clients, black individuals fear that if they seek formal mental-health assistance they will be labeled “crazy” or blamed for their problems. Unlike other patients, African-Americans are also reluctant to seek services because of a longstanding tradition that dirty laundry should not be aired to others, and that they must solve their problems on their own.

When African-Americans obtain assistance and meet with a white therapist they are often fearful that these therapists will be biased, use stereotypes, minimize the clients’ experiences of discrimination and not understand black cultural traditions. Even if a black client has a black therapist, the client may rightly fear that the therapist may be unable to relate to the client due to differences in education, class or life experiences.

As more African-Americans seek therapy, service providers are challenged to offer culturally competent services to all clients. In my more than 20 years of providing clinical services and supervision, colleagues and students from both majority and minority groups have expressed confusion and perplexity about how to treat African-Americans, and how to conduct the kind of successful first session that increases the chances that the client will return.

Psychotherapy and Spirituality:

Birds of a Feather
by Gary L. Hellman, MDiv, LP, LMHC

Psychotherapy and Spirituality are traditional methods of care for the soul. People use each of these methods to grow, to heal, and to face the deepest meanings of life. Each tradition focuses its effort in a rigorous practice as well as a thoughtful inquiry. However, these two traditions need some explanation when linked together. In this brief article, I would like to reflect upon some of the common themes and the new context in which these two traditions are increasingly used in tandem traditional methods of care for the soul. People use each of these methods to grow, to heal, and to face the deepest meanings of life. Each tradition focuses its effort in a rigorous practice as well as a thoughtful inquiry. However, these two traditions need some explanation when linked together. In this brief article, I would like to reflect upon some of the common themes and the new context in which these two traditions are increasingly used in tandem.

Each person’s reasons for seeking counseling are unique; usually one event precipitates a call for help. Emotional pain such as depression and anxiety are very often what people describe when they first come into treatment. For some, life has become superficial, too commercial, and often meaningless. Frustration in relationships in family and in work life is plentiful. Psychotherapeutic services have been organized in our society to address a person’s mental, emotional and interpersonal difficulties. A modern phrase suggests that treatments are for “behavioral health”. In our rational culture, a gulf has evolved between the exploration of the “sacred” area of a person’s life and the medical treatment directed to correct a “disorder”. It is fairly safe to say that most therapists have been reluctant, as well as untrained, to engage in or appreciate a person’s spiritual or religious life as a part of the resources for treatment.

In the light of the general need to care for and serve our large diverse culture and to protect the rights of all people from prejudice, we have established laws to ensure that a competent therapist is available; but this therapist may not necessarily be from the patient’s native tradition or religious heritage. As a culture, therefore, we have deferred to a rational scientific view in our thoughts about emotional and psychological care.

Spirituality’s Impact on Psychotherapy

As the twentieth century comes hurriedly to a close, there has been a decisive shift toward forms of psychotherapy that honor the deeply spiritual dimension of a person’s life. Psychotherapists therefore have taken additional training to learn about their own spiritual backgrounds in order to understand the psychological and spiritual dimensions of relationships that develop in treatment. The therapist must understand not only the “therapeutic frame of treatment” and the rich analytic traditions that explicate therapeutic processes, but also a deepening knowledge of spirituality and the importance of spiritual practices to each person in treatment. Each therapist learns to respect her personal spiritual depth as a vital dimension of a therapeutic process that is far more collaborative and interpersonal today than ever before.

Visit our Blog!

BLOG

http://vanessamahmoud.wordpress.com

Call 404-687-9945

for an appointment

today!

Featured Resources for Psychotherapy

Other Services

We accept reimbursement from most major insurance plans. We also are a full-service Employee Assistance Provider with a number of major companies. We work closely with many local agencies to provide crisis debriefing and assessment in various emergent situations. See the rest of our site to read about these services.

Workshops, Training and Education

Workshops are offered and developed for our clients on a number of topics. Parenting, Social Justice Issues, Cultural Effectiveness, Narrative Techniques, Marital Enrichment and Communication are a few of the areas for which we design workshops and training experiences.

Take time for yourself, give us a call.

(404) 687-9945

Articles:
Recovering from Shame
by Alan Chisolm, MDiv, LP, NCPsyA

A few years ago an article on the front page of the Sunday Times caught my attention. It was about a bold journalistic step taken in a series published in the Des Moines Register. A woman, Nancy Ziegenmeyer, told the story of her rape, from the assault itself through her experiences with the police, the hospital, the prosecutors and the courtroom, as well as her recovery with her husband and three small children. The story minced no words, spared no details, told it straight. Ms. Ziegenmayer had been encouraged to come forward by a column written by the editor, who argued that the traditional news treatment of rape victims as anonymous creates a conspiracy of silence that isolates the victim.

The article went on to tell of the response to the series, largely positive, but with considerable debate about its propriety. I was struck by a portion of a letter from a 26 year old Des Moines woman who said she had been raped eleven years earlier. Prior to her letter she had told just one person of her ordeal. “I am in awe of your strength and courage,” she wrote to Ms. Ziegenmeyer. “I hope that you are the first link in a chain of recovery. I think I never really believed that other people like me existed. Rape victims never have a name or a face. You are helping me to find mine.”

The letter was her first step out of the pit of shame. The experience of shame is the fear that in being seen or known, one will be exposed to contempt and humiliation. The urge is to hide or isolate ourselves. Some of us turn on ourselves with self-contempt. We suffer the pain of feeling flawed, defective: something’s wrong with me; I’m bad, a disappointment, or a failure, or too much of a burden.

A young man I know, a competent professional, feels so painfully inadequate and flawed inside, that he goes to great lengths to gain the recognition from others, particularly superiors, that he denies himself. It’s as though he is on a perpetual search for a blessing. Yet he distrusts those who think highly of him, like the man who thinks that anyone who would have him for a friend is a fool.

Another man who has devoted much of his life to taking care of others is becoming aware of his own need: a deep yearning to feel special and cared about that has never been adequately met. He feels ashamed of his neediness when it shows, and has the urge to hide. He gives to others what he needs himself. He acts competent and self-sufficient, and hides his “secret” need.

Shame needs to be clearly distinguished from guilt. Guilt has to do with feelings I have about what I have done; shame is about who or what I am. I may feel and be guilty for something I have done or left undone which has hurt you. Shame is about my being. Something is wrong with me.

I suspect all of us have suffered abuse in our lives by people important to us - a teacher who humiliated you, a parent who wasn’t sufficiently there for you to convey to you enough good feeling and delight for you to develop a good sense of yourself. Or who violated your privacy by reading your private letters, or treated you with contempt, or was physically or sexually abusive.

All victims of abuse feel shame. Daddy is mistreating me, yells at me, or gets drunk: I must have done something bad. But I can’t think what it is; something must be wrong with me, or he wouldn’t do it. Mother never seems to have time to hear what’s going on with me: maybe I’m a disappointment to her. I’ll have to try harder. I want so much to feel special. But it seems like I’m not supposed to talk about it... Such are some of the reasonings of the child within us, who has tried for years to make sense of the ways important people have failed him by deciding that it’s something the matter with him.

Like Adam and Eve in the garden, we want to hide. Somehow it feels safer to present a false self to the world, a mask that conceals the terrible secret about ourselves.

As a therapist, I’ve become aware of another aspect of shame: not wanting to see, or hear or know. I’ve caught myself changing the subject rather than staying with an awful experience I’d rather not witness. While a healthy measure of shame is evident in modesty and respect for privacy, crippling shame can lead to a conspiracy of silence. So I learn to hold and listen to the intolerable, and a client gradually unfolds a painful story.

Mandala Psychotherapy Associates

Seek knowledge, wisdom and understanding