Gus Stephan

If you are reading this then you or a loved one might be feeling stuck in some aspect of your life. Whether this feeling is related to something internal, external, relational, or spiritual, I am excited for the prospect of meeting you there and being alongside you or your family. I believe to really be alongside someone in their experience they must be treated as the expert in their own life. I believe that our early and past relational experiences impact how we perceive the world around us and how we perceive and show up in current relationships. And how could they not? Connection to others is vital to our survival. This is not metaphorical. Evolutionarily we were more likely to survive when we were able to rely on and be connected with others. We still carry this trait with us. It is a part of being human. Connection is so vital that we find clever ways to seek, maintain, and preserve it. These moves always make sense. You always make sense. However, sometimes the moves we learned that we needed to survive or to be loved show up in times, places, or relationships that they are no longer needed; or they show up in ways that actually stop us from getting the love we need. Sometimes we need help making sense of these clever parts of ourselves from a professional that can show up in a unique way in a setting that is solely meant for you. I am a Supervisee in Social Work serving the NOVA area who works with families, individuals and couples. I received my master’s degree in Social Work from Western Carolina University after working in the mental health field for eight years in the Asheville NC area. Before that, I received my bachelor’s degree in psychology from Virginia Tech. I have experience in wilderness therapy, public schools, specialized schools for the neurodiverse, residential treatment, therapeutic boarding schools, foster care, intensive in-home services, and outpatient therapy. In my time training and supervising foster care families, working in intensive in-home services, and serving families and couples in the private practice setting, I've learned how to work with family systems to improve closeness and connection using evidence based practices grounded in clinical research. I’ve come to learn that behind every challenging behavior there is an unmet need. I work with families and couples to reduce challenging behaviors and distressing dynamics by exploring and working with clients to identify and meet those needs. In my work with couples I lean on my training in Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy to help you and your partner feel seen and heard by one another, to understand the painful dance that you may get stuck in over and over again, to have different conversations with each other about those stuck places, to understand the needs that can be hidden from one another in those stuck places, and to create more openness, availability, and closeness in your relationship. In my work with children and families I support parents by giving practical parenting strategies, treating them as the leaders of their households, and providing a framework to understand difficult behaviors or strong emotions that inevitably come up in the child-parent relationship. I utilize experiential models of therapy to engage younger children in the therapeutic process and have a wealth of experience working with children of all ages and backgrounds. I believe that the most effective mechanism of change is the parent child relationship. As such, I include parents in the therapeutic process as much as is appropriate. I am a certified Parent Child Interaction Therapist and have training and experience in other models such as Theraplay, Emotionally Focused Family Therapy, and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. I work with individuals in a way that works for them. This means that my first priority is to meet you wherever you may be in your therapeutic journey and to treat you as an expert in your own life. Through exploring your attachment experiences, your protections, and your beliefs about yourself and the world, I can help you make sense of internal or external distress and work with you to find new strength, heal past injuries, and create new ways of showing up in relationships or within yourself.