Welcome to Lighthouse Whole Health, the private practice of Curt Kearney, MA, LCPC
I’m guessing you might be here because you’re interested in possibly doing therapy with me. So why don’t I jump right in and tell you some about how therapy with me might work.
I would want to co-create with you a therapy that will really work best for you, based on what we both can offer. We can of course draw on the expertise I can offer around the best approaches to psychotherapy that I know of. And I think your wisdom would be truly crucial as well. If we can collaborate well enough around what we both can offer I think we can be best help you. Like with a lot of things, two heads are better than one in therapy!…
I’ve been doing this a long time and I have picked up a bunch of specialties. For instance, we might focus on issues of anxious or depressive feelings or states, on relationship difficulties, on bipolar disorder, eating disorders, hard to define/”existential” discomforts or dysphorias, complex or developmental trauma, support through a difficult period of life, grieving, difficulties thriving, ADHD, PTSD, addiction/substance use disorder issues, OCD.
We could draw on some of the best of “time honored” approaches to psychotherapy, such as CBT, relational psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and DBT as well as on more recent additions or alternative additions to psychotherapy such as IFS (Internal Family Systems therapy), Jungian psychology, meditation, Schema Therapy, and Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT).
The main frame that I tend to bring to the table might be called something like a relational, somatic IFS frame. To unpack that some briefly, I see our psychology and our mental health as deeply relational, both in our relationships with the people in our lives and our worlds and in terms of our relationships with our own complex selves, including our bodies. If there’s enough harmony in those internal and external relationships — and it doesn’t have to be perfect harmony, just “good enough” — then we tend to have much better mental health. I think this is a big frame and together we can hang or customize a lot on it.
Speaking of our bodies, we could also draw on my background in integrative health approaches for steps around your physical well being which is often so foundational to emotional well being. I studied integrative health at Dr. Andrew Weil’s Center at University of Arizona.
I am also open to spiritual/religious/meaning-based approaches if that might be a good fit for you. We could draw on traditions you are involved in or that you might be interested in towards your mental health. Even if I am not a member of a particular tradition, I am very respectful of varied traditions, from the West, East, Native communities, and more novel spiritual/religious approaches. Or in a more existential frame, we might “just” explore your own personal senses of meaning that you can create or find towards your well being and mental health.
Of course, we could also focus explicitly on healthy relationships, which are of great value in and of themselves and can be so crucial to our mental health. After all, as Aristotle said, we’re social animals, we need each other!
This multifaceted, co-created sort of approach to therapy is often called “integrative” in that it can integrate work with your body, mind, spirit, and communities for your well being. I also think of it as integrative in the sense of collaboration between therapist and patient/client. I believe we are complex beings with complex lives and such a multifaceted, collaborative, customized approach can most realistically help us.
For further steps beyond what I can offer, I have a network of colleagues I collaborate with regularly if you might be interested in exploring other specialized treatment options, like psychiatrists, body workers, integrative medicine physicians, ketamine (psychedelic) providers, and others.
More and more of my practice is drawing on psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. I am currently a therapist in Usona Institute’s psilocybin for depression phase 2 study. I am also a student in CIIS’s Certificate in Psychedelic Therapy and Research. I partner with some ketamine mental health providers in the Chicago area so we could potentially integrate ketamine sessions into our work together. As the laws allow, I will be expanding the psychedelic assisted psychotherapy focus of my practice. For now, we could work on preparatory and integration work around psychedelic assisted psychotherapies.
We might work together in a more brief, specific issue focused timeframe of therapy or a more ongoing approach. Like just about all of this, we can customize the timeframe and we can also change course with timeframes as suits your needs as they change over time.
Please feel free to reach out if you’d like to see about starting therapy with me. I usually like to have a brief phone conversation so that we can get to know each other a bit and see if working together might be a good fit.
Regardless, good job seeking greater well being for yourself and for your places in the world.
You can find out more about my experience and education on my LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/curt-kearney-39824643/