Nancy Walker
Counseling for the Human Spirit
Credentials & Experience
I received a Bachelor's Degree in Child Development. I completed my graduate work and hold a Diploma in the UK in Biographical Counseling. I am a member of the Professional Association of Biographical Counsellors (PABC) and the British Association of Professional Counsellors (BACP).
I am Level I, II and III trained in Internal Family Systems, currently completing the protocol for obtaining Certification.
I have specialized trauma training from the Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute.
I have undertaken various trainings and hold certificates in Hakomi Integrative, Psycho-Physical Therapy, Voice Dialogue and Sand Tray Therapy,
I incorporate Attachment Theory, Psychodynamic Theory, Jungian Theory, Imaginal Theory, along with a variety of Artistic and Expressive Arts into our process
I am schooled in variety of Mindfulness and Meditation doctrines and practices.
Methods
The commonality among all of the approaches that I engage is that each serves to include your present experience and past history, but also access the innate intelligence and wisdom beyond your everyday thinking and conscious awareness. They are experiential and seek to connect into that which is known, but also reach beyond, over and above the stories that inhabit your everyday awareness, stories you may have told yourself for years, your stuck patterns, extreme behavior and unconscious material. By calling upon these resources and the insights gleaned, your inner struggles and battles you may have been fighting fo years, can be not only illuminated but reevaluated and re-imagined from a more profound and enlightened perspective.
Internal Family Systems (IFS)
IFS introduces you to a picture of your psyche and helps you to map its inner conflicts. It is an effective therapeutic process for healing exiled, protective or reactive parts inside you. Troubling inner voices, feelings of vulnerability, inadequacy, and overwhelm can be calmed, previously constraining feelings and beliefs can be shifted and reimagined. Aspects that are stuck back in time can be updated, inner burdens alleviated and extreme parts transformed. IFS is a highly cogent method of guiding you to a sense of Self, a state of inner clarity and compassion. This Self is not often experienced because it is obscured by defenses created from old wounds and overshadowed by fear, pain, and shame of past trauma, but as this Self emerges it can form healing relationships with your conflicted parts and in turn allow you to live from a Self led place. As a result, the entire system can work together as a whole, to benefit of the all.
Biographical Counseling
Biographical Counseling offers a pathway to healing and development through a deeper, spiritually oriented understanding of the human being. While each individual's life story is unique, within the biographical landscape, Biographical Counseling recognizes universal 7 year phases that span throughout the lifetime. It understands that our development doesn’t stop when we reach adulthood. Even when we may have stopped growing physically, there are many perhaps more subtle parts of us that keep developing. Certain soul questions pertain to and shed insight for each stage of development. Different parts of us continue to seek out recognition and realization into old age. Central to this continual drive for self-realization is the question: Am I doing what I have come to do? It is against this backdrop that we look to make sense of past experiences, address current issues, concerns and difficulties, and raise questions about how to make steps towards our future so that we begIn to understand the role we have over our own destinies. Navigating between this polarity of the spiritual and physical, Biographical Counselling serves to support the growth and development of the “I” that straddles both worlds.
Biography Work
Biography Work employs artistic and expressive means to help portray and chart who we are and what our life experience is telling us. We gather threads that weave together a picture of our talents, skills, ideals and passions in order to see what belongs to you and what needs to be attended to in order to live into the future that is calling you. Using a phenomenological approach, it offers an opportunity to explore the extraordinary and sacred panorama of your life based on life long phases of development, so that that you can step back from being in it and witness from a more expansive vantage point of open heart and mind. In this way, you learn to read the life story, rather than tell it, to discover the meaning or essence of your experiences and life as a whole. It is in this way that the question, "Why did this happened to me?' becomes 'Why did this happen for me?
Hakomi Integrative: Mindful, Somatic, experiential therapy
An interweaving mindfulness and body awareness. guide a person into their current awareness of sensations, thoughts, and emotional experience and to assist the person in staying directly with and aware of their process. The Hakomi process of inquiry is a method for discovering the habitual and reflexive responses emerging out of core material and helping people to change by updating and re- establishing their core beliefs through mindful attention to their felt experience. This present moment attunement allows a person to be more congruent with who s/he at the core of their being
Psycho-Physical Therapy
PPT was developed by Bill Bowen. Central to this work is the exploration of the mind/body interface. It strives for the active integration of the physical and psychological and the establishment of centering presence. It believes that the fragmentation of body, mind, and spirit, which is common in our contemporary culture, is at the root of much of the trauma and suffering we see. It works with clients to help them re-establish optimal psycho-physical resources necessary to live peaceful and integrated lives. The approach does not typically focus on what is going wrong or not working in a person's life. Instead, therapists help individuals in treatment explore the mind-body interface, accessing and utilizing their own internal ability to achieve greater well-being.
Sandtray Therapy
Sandtray work helps to give expression to as yet unrecognized or non-verbalized inner dynamics and relationships. It creates time and space for deep or defended aspects of the psyche to emerge in a safe and non-threatening manner in an effort to reclaim or rediscover the inner world.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy: Trauma
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy is a method for facilitating the processing of unassimilated sensorimotor reactions to trauma and for resolving the destructive effects of these reactions on cognitive and emotional experience
Voice Dialogue
Voice Dialogue is a process of self discovery through meeting and working with sub-personalities (parts); parts that feel like they belong to you and others that may live in the shadow and are disowned. It employs a Gestalt method for eliciting the different selves and facilitates a position of non-judgmental consideration of the selves, the Aware Ego.
Awareness, Mindfulness and Meditation
Practices and techniques to aid in broadening awareness, growing intuitive capacities, awakening cognitive feeling, unhooking from thought and opening up to heart knowing.
Areas of Focus
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Life transitions
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Anxiety or depression
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Relationship Issues
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Stress & Overwhelm
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Life Purpose + Meaning
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Identity Struggles
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Gender issues
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Work and career Issues
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Parenting support
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Grief and loss
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Isolation and loneliness
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Overcoming Trauma
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Issues of spirituality
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Existential questions
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Personal Sovereignty
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Creative Blocks
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Developing intuition
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Mindfulness & Meditation
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Personal Agency
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Perfectionism
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Anger and rage
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Problems with attention
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Fears and phobias
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Promiscuity
"No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it."
~Albert Einstein
Nancy Walker
Choosing a counselor is an important decision that asks for the right fit. I offer a free consultation to answer your questions or as a way of getting to know one another.
DURHAM HOUSE
1012 SW KING AVENUE
SUITE 105
PORTLAND, OR 97205