Sam Robinson, LCMHCA
Weaverville & Asheville
Life is relational. From our first breath to our last, we are in relation to someone or something. Oftentimes, our suffering can be traced back to feeling stuck in our ways of relating, finding that no matter who or what we’re relating to, we feel anxious, depressed, unheard, or unloved. At these moments, it can be helpful to pause and observe how our relationships and/or general patterns of relating are constraining or frustrating our lives in some way.
I am pursuing my training in Modern Psychoanalysis, which endeavors to cultivate a space where reflective transformation can occur. Through the therapeutic relationship, I hope that you can learn to compassionately observe patterns of relating and creatively rework or enhance them to better align with your values, goals, and the natural contours of your life.
It can be helpful to remember that healing is not always about “becoming whole”, but rather, to become more comfortable with our own fragmented selves. It’s about learning to more fully embody and express these fragmented selves and, in doing so, come to appreciate the fragmented nature of everyone and everything. Perhaps, the places where each of us are broken is actually where we fit together with one another.
Some of the themes that I enjoy working with are anxiety, depression, grief, developmental trauma, relationship issues, faith, doubt, addiction, meaninglessness, existential drift, spirituality, family of origin difficulties, dreaming, and meditation.
“…the most fundamental human need is that of being and becoming more fully oneself, which to my mind, involves becoming more fully present and alive to one’s thoughts, feelings, and bodily states; becoming better able to sense one’s own unique creative potentials and finding forms in which to develop them; feeling that one is speaking one’s own ideas with a voice of one’s own; becoming a larger person (perhaps more generous, more compassionate, more loving, more open) in one’s relationships with others; developing more fully a humane and just value system and set of ethical standards; and so on…”
(Thomas Ogden)
“It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.”
(D.W. Winnicott)