COUNSELING SERVICES
INdIVIDuAL Counseling
At times, Living can feel like suffering, like it’s solely stress, depression, anger, and anxiety. Maybe you aren’t sure why this is happening to you. Maybe you’re aware of reasons for the pain but aren’t sure how to cope with and decrease those bleak feelings . When realities don’t match our hopes, it may seem like something is missing and life can feel incongruent. If you are feeling overwhelmed by stress, worry, or the past, individual counseling can provide the tools to help you process and overcome the past, deal with the present, and look forward to the future.
Pain and sadness aren’t enjoyable to feel but avoiding or bottling them only increases their debilitating power. In private and confidential therapy sessions, we will face experiences, emotions, even troubling memories. This creates space for peace, acceptance, and a positive outlook. Your emotions are messages to you, and you can learn to strengthen your heart and mind, to respond in a healthy manner, and improve your life and relationships.
An attuned therapeutic relationship can be the foundation for healing wounds of trauma, relationship difficulties, isolation, and depression. Cultivating an authentic, collaborative, and trusting partnership with the proper therapist is key.
Phillip Barton, MS, LCPC uses treatment approaches that are evidenced-based to help clients improve and expand their outlook. Therapy sessions will assist clients in seeing their challenges in new perspectives and provide unbiased feedback to support their journey in managing their behavior and emotional wellness.
Ascend Wellness Counseling and Psychotherapy offers experience in treating these issues and more:
Stress & Anxiety / Depression / Anger Management / Life Transitions / Relationships / Communication Difficulties / Trauma / Sexual abuse / Addictions / Boundary Setting / Grief & Loss …and many further concerns
New client appointments are now available during the week. Call or email today to get started.
“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.” – Carl Jung
COUPLES Counseling
Each of us is hardwired to love and connect deeply. A loving relationship can bring you to new ground and can help you become the best version of yourself, but it will also challenge your expectations, requiring you to see yourself and life in fresh ways. However, relationships are living, ever-changing things. They can be fragile, bringing out both the good and the bad within you as you travel life’s journey with your loved one.
Though love sparks wonderful passion, it will also spark your deepest insecurities, causing you hold it too close, push it away, or do too little to keep it alive. With Phillip Barton, MS, LCPC Therapist, and Ascend Wellness of Frederick, you can walk together with your partner to learn how to practice healthy communication and address topics instead of avoiding them or overreacting. You can both acquire the skills to honor your own feelings rather than dismissing them to appease the other, for doing so can lead to resentment — and resentment leads to the destruction of a relationship.
“If you avoid conflict to keep the peace, you start a war inside yourself.” — Cheryl Richardson
In love, trust is vital — but it can be diminished by small, everyday neglect or by injuries from larger violations and betrayal. In order to heal our relationships and to continue together grow in them, we must strengthen our tolerance, stretch our efforts, and deepen our understanding of what love truly requires.
Couples Counseling Areas:
Relationship Difficulties / Communication Difficulties / Sexuality and Intimacy / Infidelity / Life Transitions / Parenting Co-Parenting & Blended Families / Pregnancy & Birth / Boundary Setting …and other relationship challenges.
Call or email Ascend Wellness of Frederick to schedule an appointment.
GRIEF & END OF LIFE
Death, grief, and loss are an integral part of our life experience. While each of us is certain to face them, they’re difficult to prepare for, encounter, and deal with in healthy ways. You may feel angry, guilty, uncertain or overwhelmingly sad. You may be struggling to manage the emotional ups and downs that are normal with bereavement. Grief is a normal response to loss; it’s a way of recognizing the value of what you no longer have. By uncovering ways to cope with, or even embrace, the uncomfortable feelings of loss, grief can take you on a road of self-discovery and, eventually, renewal.
Grief counseling can help you understand and integrate your loss in ways that provide comfort. You can learn to see grief as transformative and meaningful, an experience that can add to your growth as a person. Through dedicated bereavement counseling, clients can emerge from despair to feeling once again like there is “sun” in their life. With patience and time, you too can find peace.
END OF LIFE Counseling
For those who are facing the end of their own life, fear, uncertainty, and anger can become overriding. Though death is a guaranteed experience for each of us, it is common to feel lost and isolated when you are facing your own mortality. Your worries aren’t only about yourself, but about your loved ones and how to make sure things for them are “in order.” Finding the right counselor to walk through this process with you can help you arrive at peace and acceptance. It is an honor to partner with a person as they navigate this deeply personal part of life.
Phillip Barton, MS, LCPC Therapist has dedicated training in thanatology (the study of grief, death, and dying), and provides a safe and comforting environment to assist individuals through their grieving process.
Grief Counseling or End of Life Counseling can be a help those dealing with:
Accidental death or Overdose / Caretaking / Chronic Illnesses & Anticipatory Grief / Suicide / Homicide / Terminal Illness / End of Life Issues / Miscarriages ...and a wide range of additional concerns.
If you are experiencing trouble adjusting to a loss or to the prospect of your own death, call or email Ascend Wellness today to schedule a counseling appointment.