Mind Anchor Counseling, PLLC was created by Jon Lears to provide community and home-based psychotherapeutic services for individuals struggling with mental health challenges and addiction. Living day to day in our culture can be very difficult because of the many stressors, responsibilities, and expectations that we and society place on ourselves, which are usually accompanied by some image of success in school, work, or relationships. Combine these expectations with mental illness and addiction, and it can be an almost guaranteed set-up for failure and unhappiness if we hold these images of success as our standard of happiness.

I meet with clients both in their homes and in the community to help them explore and navigate their lives to find meaning in life, thus supporting them in determining for themselves what it means to be successful in life. I do this by providing authentic relationship and therapeutic mentoring.

Authentic Relationship

Authentic relationship is authentic in that I encourage clients to express their genuine thoughts, feelings, and emotions that are occurring in any given moment. These could include thoughts, feelings, and emotions about their life circumstances, their relationships with others, their relationship with themselves, or their relationship with me. In some sense, this is not a technique. It’s an experience. It’s an experience of being in a therapeutic relationship that strives toward acceptance of all thoughts, feelings, and emotions, provided that they are not threatening or harmful toward self or other. It is a relationship in which we both strive for authenticity: being open, honest, genuine, and congruent with our thoughts, feelings, and emotions… with our experience. What I’m offering here is an experience that can only be pointed to with the words on this page. I like to think of the authentic relationship as being beyond technique, but rather something that can only be found through experience. It can be graceful and brilliant at times, and it can be sloppy and clumsy at times. Whatever it may be, we are striving to be genuine and congruent with our experience.

Being in an authentic relationship can be very healing through its cathartic process. It is a unique relationship that allows for the exploration of self in relationship to another. I practice active listening and yielding to the client’s process. I balance that with giving back to the client by bringing a sense of curiosity while providing my own reflections and questions in response to your process. I may disclose what I am experiencing in response to you, if I believe that it would benefit you and the therapeutic relationship by providing us with insight into self-exploration, self-discovery, and self-knowledge. This process of self-exploration and getting to know oneself can lead into finding meaning in life as we discover our passions and what drives us to move forward in life.

Therapeutic Mentoring

When clients begin to find meaning in their lives, determining what it means for them to be successful in their lives, we work together toward reaching and fulfilling the steps that move them closer to that success. Whether helping clients with extreme mental health challenges, addictions, developmental disabilities, young adults transitioning into adulthood, or clients re-entering the community from jail, my philosophy has always been the same: let’s do whatever we need to do to help you move forward in your life.

Therapeutic mentoring could include striving toward a multitude of aspirations and goals in various areas of one’s life. It could include helping clients navigate and develop healthy relationships with various people in their lives, such as family members, significant others, employees and co-workers, or helping them develop healthy relationships with themselves. It could include helping clients learn and develop skills, such as employment skills like job hunting, résumé building, preparing for an interview, or finding volunteer work. It could include taking the steps to continuing an education. It could include basic life skills such as finding housing, maintaining a household, preparing meals, doing laundry, paying bills, or making and maintaining a budget. It could include connecting to various community resources such as government benefits, mental health services, physical health and exercise, and finding communities that meet our spiritual needs. I will work with you to help you find your motivation so that we can complete these tasks together.

The key to successful therapeutic mentoring is in the relationship between the therapeutic mentor and client. It is important for me, as the therapeutic mentor, to provide a safe relationship of openness, honesty, and trust so that we can explore and work through issues that may come up in the form of internal obstacles and resistance. We cultivate clarity and confidence from the practice of expressing ourselves authentically.