Jodie Miller, LPC

I’ve practiced counseling in various settings for over 23 years, and I’ve had significant success with my clients. I strive to create an environment of trust, safety, and total acceptance, and I use an approach that does not seek to judge, heal, or even change. The goal is to bring my clients to a more realistic view of themselves, others, and the world based on rational, objective evaluations.

I believe that as humans our beliefs, feelings, and actions are influenced by three separate perspectives. The illness or pathology perspective looks at things as healthy or unhealthy, well or ill. Within the moral or religious perspective, we view and even judge ourselves, others, and the world as good or bad, righteous or sinful. These two perspectives can lead individuals into thinking they are abnormal, mentally defective, immoral, or sinful and can result in feelings of shame, guilt, doubt, helplessness, and despair. And who wants that??

If, however, we understand that all of our behaviors are attempts to survive psychologically—in much the same ways that we try to survive physically—and if we are able to objectively rather than judgmentally evaluate these behaviors, we can bypass those unwanted emotional byproducts of the illness and moral perspectives and begin the real work of understanding and accepting ourselves using more realistic criteria.

Think of psychological survival not in terms of life or death, but in terms of success, fulfillment, and integrity—defined by you alone. As we attempt to survive psychologically, we utilize all parts of our psyche, and some parts may not be pretty or pleasant. However, these might be the very parts of us we need to emerge from the shadows, “to pop up and rescue us from ourselves”.

One of my favorite quotes states it quite eloquently: “Every one of us has a thousand different kinds of little people inside of us. And some of them want to get out and be wild, and some want to be sad, or happy, or inventive, or even just go dancing! That’s why we all have so many different urges at different times. And all those different little people inside of us…we must never be afraid to take them with us wherever we go. I mean, who knows when we might need one of them to pop up and rescue us from ourselves! The great secret is not the variety of life, it’s the variety of us.” ~Lwaxana Troi (portrayed by Majel Barrett in Star Trek: TNG)