Individual Counseling in Madison, WI

Our Counseling Philosophy

Provenance Counseling Madison offers mental health counseling for individuals, with a client-centered focus. Our Madison therapists are committed to assisting you identify and achieve your personal goals: to decrease your experience of loneliness, fear of emptiness, experience of shame and anger; and to increase your sense of wholeness, connection, freedom, agency, and peace. We will sit with you in your pain, your joy, and throughout your growth. We will guide you on your journey towards increased connection with yourself and others.

Why Heal Through Therapy?

It’s not easy to fully feel emotions. There can be many fears about the experience. We all have conditioning based on generational patterns in our families, past traumas, and our cultures that influence our comfort level with emotions. When we experience aversion to emotions, we numb them. We numb them by holding tension in our bodies, engaging in unhealthy behaviors, and maintaining untrue beliefs. Sometimes, instead of numbing, we will indulge in the emotions, over-focusing on them and making them larger than they need to be; this is also a defense strategy. These patterns are intended to protect you and often did so during a time when feeling the vulnerability of the emotions would have been overwhelming.

When we continue to maintain these patterns after the threat is gone, they create issues in our personal, relational, professional, and spiritual lives. By numbing painful emotions, we also numb the enjoyable ones. We end up feeling so numb, all we feel is emptiness. The longer emotions are avoided, the stronger they come back. They come back when you’re least expecting it and can feel uncontrollable. This leads to feelings of disconnectedness, feeling emotions intensely or not at all, and a general lack of meaning and fulfillment in your life.  It is not easy to fully feel emotions and you have to feel it to heal it. A supportive mental health counselor can help you feel, and heal, these emotions.

How Our Madison Therapists Support You

In our psychotherapy sessions, we will guide you in recognizing patterns and beliefs that limit you, prevent connection with your emotions, and preclude your healing. When you feel ready, we will guide you in letting go of these unhealthy behaviors and ‘no longer necessary’ beliefs.  As this occurs, you are likely to experience an increase in emotional intensity. When the emotions become too much and you are tempted to re-engage in past behaviors, you will be prepared. We will have given you practical, research-proven effective skills that will enable you to avoid the intense emotions until you are ready and able to re-approach them. When you slip up and engage in unhealthy behaviors again, we will be here to offer validation and support so that you can take an honest look at what didn’t work so that you are able to get right back on the path of healing. When you are ready to feel the emotions, we will actively guide you in recognizing and describing the body sensations associated with specific emotions. This will help you distinguish your emotions from one another so that you can determine what they are and what they are trying to communicate to you. 

Mental health counseling aims to change your relationship with your emotions. Therapy provides a safe space to:

  • develop an awareness of any aversions you may feel towards emotions

  • learn how these aversions served a purpose in the past

  • develop a curiosity about what the emotions feel like so you can perceive and describe them non-judgmentally

  • learn how to tolerate emotions/sensations safely

  • develop the ability to allow emotions and their sensations to come and go without efforts to control them

  • develop a friendship with them so you can find meaning in the emotions

Our therapeutic goal is to guide you in this so many times, that you feel wholly capable of doing this independently.

(Germer, C.K. (2009).  The mindful path to self-compassion: freeing yourself from destructive thoughts and emotions.  The Guilford Press.

Inclusivity in Our Madison Therapy Practice

Our Madison counselors embrace diversity and consider our space to be a safe space for all individuals including persons of color, different faiths, differing abilities, LGBTQIA+, GNC, monogamous, and polyamory/non-monogamous persons. We recognize you as the experts of yourselves and your experiences. We also do not expect you to educate us. We recognize there is a substantial amount of discrimination, cultural -isms, gaslighting, privilege, and fragility that does not allow for all individuals’ experiences and perspectives to be heard and valued. We want you to know we are listening and we believe you. Our goal is to offer support and guidance from an open, safe, supportive, and compassionate perspective.

Modalities

  • Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy

  • Mindfulness-Based Therapies

  • Dialectical Behavioral Therapy

  • Compassion-Focused Therapy

  • Interpersonal Reconstructive Therapy

  • Somatic Experiencing

  • Somatic-Based Therapies