Transformation Is Possible
Turn Anxiety, Depression, and Trauma into Wisdom, Creativity, and Purpose
Online Counseling in California
Catalyst for Change
Suffering initiates us onto a path of self-discovery. Anxiety, depression, and trauma are incredibly difficult experiences and can catalyze a process that ends up transforming us.
Your current experience can be an invitation to turn anxiety, depression, and trauma into your hard-earned wisdom and ally.
It’s inherently uncomfortable, but our inner struggles provide an opportunity to achieve the difficult – healing, self-knowledge, and empowerment.
If we accept the challenge and lessons our problems present, along the way we also become more compassionate and wise friends, partners, parents, teachers, leaders, healers and elders.
If we don’t accept the invitation to transform ourselves, we end up miserable, thinking something is wrong with us and forever wondering why we are so unlucky in life.
The Journey to Well-Being
The beginning is the hardest part.
However, the effort of showing up again and again for a process of honest self reflection, sincere expression of feelings, a self-discovery of the innate values you want to live out, and how you can be of service to your community, has a cumulative result: a clear and empowered you. This is an investment in you and all you love.
It’s a journey that when you look back upon it, you will feel satisfaction and pride, but it will only be the beginning. You have a long life to live.
The results will be unique to you, but it will involve deepening and growing your self-awareness and creativity.
Have you ever seen Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama laughing like children, hugging each other, and offering up wisdom teachings? They have been through unimaginable loss and violence.
Let’s be certain – transformation is possible.
What could be more important?
Mental health, as defined by the World Health Organization, is “…a state of well-being in which every individual realizes his or her own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to her or his community.”
So much of this definition relies on a well functioning community, economy, and culture. Being alive today is to have grief and sorrow about the state of things. We are, as a people, increasingly disconnected from ourselves, others, and the natural world. We are approaching a time of great uncertainty. Naturally people are feeling this and wondering how to cope. Coping may not be the answer, however. In fact your whole being might be pushing you to do the opposite. There could be great medicine in it.
I am curious to know what you consider to be well being and health in our world today. Tell me, what could be more important?
Connection and Community
We are all deeply connected and hard wired to live in community. When you are well inside, you contribute to a healthy family, community, and world.
The super media would like you to feel lonely and inadequate – that’s how they make money – on enforcing the feeling of ‘lack.’ It’s already known that when people feel satisfied and in community, they don’t need or want much.
It is important that the outcome of our work together returns you to your community with new skills, perspectives, and gifts to share – your hard-earned wisdom and talents. I name this now because it is an essential part of the journey and often left out of the healing process dialog.
In the end, you return to the village. The village needs you… maybe now more than ever.
Are you willing to discover the lessons of what currently pains you and deepen into the uniqueness of your own path?
If so, let’s start the journey. Schedule a consultation or complete the contact form below.
Lisa Soto Dunlop, LMFT
Hi, I’m Lisa
It is my heart’s work to create a place for you to be radically honest and to safely explore what’s happening in your life. In working together, you will discover my style as a therapist is warm, compassionate, nonjudgmental, and honest; It is important to me that you feel you have a place where you can share freely, honestly, and without judgment.
To compassionately witness and be witnessed is healing.
I also make it a point to maintain cultural competency, so you do not have to go through the emotional labor of explaining the fundamentals of racial, sexual, or gender dynamics to me. Furthermore, I come from a truly diverse and eclectic family and community- celebrating and lifting up diversity is important to me. I welcome individuals who are multi-cultural, multi-racial, BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, polyamorous, rebels, artists, mystics and radicals of any kind.
I invite conversation about difference and acknowledge we are not all having the same experience.
I have trained, worked, and lived in the Mission, Noe, and Castro districts of San Francisco. I received my M.A. in Integral Counseling at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco in 2013.
