Ben Shechet, LCMHC
Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor
Durham NC
My primary aim in working with clients is to create a warm, attuned space where all parts of you feel welcome, no matter how they feel or show up. From this space of relational safety, I hope to help clients turn toward their immediate felt and sensed experience. It is contact with what is right here in the moment that begins to help stuck places untangle and hurts to heal. I often hold this process through the language of IFS, encouraging conversation and dialogue with different parts in order to understand their origins, motives, beliefs, and fears. The felt experience of the body plays a critical role in this exploration, so I also seek to support clients in learning to listen to the stories their bodies hold. As these stories express and are witnessed, the body begins to relax, open, and return to greater ease.
My journey to becoming a therapist began in 2010, following a difficult and destabilizing psychedelic experience of my own. I learned firsthand how a warm, empathic, non-pathologizing presence can make all the difference when it feels like you don't know which way is up. Since then, I have been the beneficiary of what seems like a village of healers, therapists, and teachers, and I hope to be able to pass along at least some of what I have received.