Stan Richardson II (He/they)

Identity exploration, anxiety, trauma, people-pleasing, existential dread/questioning, interpersonal relationships/communication, life transitions.

Safety to be vulnerable without judgement. The ability to engage with their pain with curiosity and understanding rather than hostility and judgement. We cannot avoid experiencing painful emotions, but we can change our relationship to them from resistant and avoidant to accepting and collaborative.

I grew up in rural south Louisiana in a heavily Catholic community. I didn't know anyone that shared my experience as a queer kid and learned that being queer was “bad” from the culture around me. Even after I accepted that I was queer, I felt like I hadn't “suffered enough” to claim my queer identity. My friends helped me challenge those cognitions and decide to come out publicly. Now, my queer identity is such a big part of who I am, even though I may not fit a lot of the stereotypes. I know everyone's experiences in life are different and that doesn't take away from our identity, it adds to it.

There are no "bad" emotions. Our emotions all have a purpose and are trying to help us in someway, even if they aren't very successful at it. By engaging with our emotions instead of avoiding, ignoring, or trying to get rid of them, we can begin to understand them, what they are trying to do, how they have helped in the past, how they are part of who we are, and how we can work with them to find more helpful and healthy solutions. To reject your emotions is to reject yourself, but that doesn't mean they have to control you. By working with them, you take back control of your mind, liberating yourself from your maladaptive coping strategies.

I engage in a lot of "deep work". This includes deep-diving into the origins, motivations, patterns, and meanings involved in our psychopathology. When my clients better understand the cognitions and traumas that cause their symptoms, it helps them take their power back from them. When my clients truly realize that they can create their own meanings and decide their own values, it liberates them from the expectations and judgement of others, allowing them to live their lives in accordance to their own values as they define them. Liberating them from binary-thinking, opening them up to the spectrum of possibilities and truths that is the reality of the human existence. Like breaking down a wall and finding a whole world on the other side of it you never thought possible but has been there all along.

I hope the client learns to engage with their thoughts, emotions, cognitions, and behaviors with curiosity instead of judgement, compassion instead of shame, collaboration instead of resistance, confident values instead of uncertainty and confusion, and can utilize all of those skills to enact the change they need in their lives, becoming their own "inner therapist".