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If You Build It Will They Come

 

I’m still here (and not just a hologram)! Read more about the transition from an office to online and telephonic counseling.

The line from the movie, Field of Dreams, is:

If you build it, they will come.

Yet I admit, up until last week, I did not know for sure if the line was true. I stated it as a question, “If you build it, will they come?”

For the last couple of years, I prepared for a transition from a stand-alone, brick-and-mortar private practice office that provided supervision for new therapists, counseling and coaching services, and a sub-speciality in autoimmune and chronic disease support, into an online and telephonic practice that would allow others to access services from different time zones, and free me to travel where I am needed. Supervision of new therapists earning hours towards licensure would also happen over the Internet and phone.

Two weeks ago, I worked furiously to pack up the office, donate some of the furniture, and begin to set up a home office base. I bid my office farewell, and yes, I did shed a few tears.

The home business license arrived in time, the movers came and moved my furniture and boxes, and I took a little time to put my head into a Half Ironman distance race in the beginning of June.

You might be wondering if the movie quote is true. Read on to find out.

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How To Drink To Your Health

health, hydration, fluids, summer, hot weather tips

by B. Imei Hsu

With all the fancy beverages out there, is it time to understand what it means to drink water when it's hot outside?
With all the fancy beverages out there, is it time to understand what it means to drink water when it’s hot outside?

Unless you’ve been hiding in a cool basement underground, you have probably noticed that parts of the U.S. are experiencing a heatwave. In the Puget Sound region where Seattle Direct Counseling is located, we’ve been hitting temperatures in the high 80’s and low 90’s. My fitness club has been filled with people running indoors in order to get their miles in without wilting, as many of us are not accustomed to exercising in weather that starts in the 70’s in the early morning and keeps climbing. We’re more used of jumping on a plane to Maui and laying in a hammock with a good book while a cool breeze passes by!

Yet every year, I see people taking actions in contradiction to the increased need to hydrate properly in warm weather. Sure, they might move from a latte to an iced latte, but there is a lack of connection with exactly what goes on when the mercury rises and you feel hot. I thought I’d give our readers a quick reminder on drinking for your health the smart way.*

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Why I Use The Client-Centered Approach To Therapy

Client Centered Medicine Client Centered Therapy Heroic Client 

I got a rock embedded in my knee, and a chance to reflect on why the Client Centered Approach to medicine and therapy works.
I got a rock embedded in my knee, and a chance to reflect on why the Client Centered Approach to medicine and therapy works.

Recently, I spent a little over an hour in an Emergency Room after having a mishap on my road bike while cycling in Maui. Having had my start in college in Nursing School completing the usual clinical rotations, the ER is a familiar place. There are machines that beep, locked glass cabinets with temperature controls and potent drugs, every kind of needle gauge and tubing within the push of a doctor’s exam room chair, and a crash cart ready to be used to save a life. 

Once the ER physician debrided the wound and extracted the piece of asphalt jutting out of the fatty tissue below my patella, I began my usual routine of assessing the state of healthcare from the distal end. “How are we doing?” was the question. While my practice exists in an office outside of the world of the hospital, I am still very much inside the healthcare world.  And when I am the patient, it gives me a chance to assess the power of client-centered medicine and therapy.

We didn’t do so well that day. Though the visit was quick and the experience not particularly unpleasant for what it was,  I began to wonder what happened to the client-centered approach as I ambled into the ER reception area. No one offered me wheelchair. And if that shocks you to hear that, as blood dribbled out of my knee, this wasn’t the first time. I had an experience only eight months earlier, where I had to hold myself up with the sliding glass doors of an ER as I dragged my dehydrated body towards the reception desk. It took two people to finally call someone to bring the wheelchair. Forty-five minutes later, I begged a nurse to give me water to swish out my mouth to clear it of the taste of vomit.

Really?

Yes, really.

Continue reading “Why I Use The Client-Centered Approach To Therapy”