WHO I AM
JC SHAKESPEARE
With a name like Shakespeare, it would seem inevitable that I would end up on stage, or as a writer, or at least teaching high school English. And it must have been inevitable, because all of those things happened. I have acted and done standup comedy professionally, and though I’ve retired from comedy, occasionally I still say something mildly amusing. I have also been on Walker, Texas Ranger, where I got knocked out by a head butt from Walker’s sidekick Trivette, I voiced the character The Avatar in the video game Ultima IX: Ascension, and I lit myself on fire in Richard Linklater’s animated cult classic, Waking Life.
But when I got a job teaching high school English, I uncovered a deep well of empathy for human beings going through that particular phase in life known as adolescence. My own teen years were rough — my father and I fought constantly, and I received zero guidance on how to handle emotions that were way too big and volatile to manage on my own. I developed patterns during that little stage in my life that went on to make things very complicated for me later in life. So working with teens, trying to teach them about the value of stories in our lives, and listening to their problems and concerns when they were struggling gave me the impetus to set aside grading papers and go into counseling as a career.
Over the past decade, I have branched out from working with teens to working with adults, especially those struggling with addiction or the emotional wounds of trauma. I have faced challenges in my own life around trauma, addiction, and grief, so my counseling experience is not just theoretical — I practice everything I share with my clients myself. I have worked in private practice for over ten years, in school settings, in a grief counseling center where I ran a group for people that had experienced the suicide of a loved one, to a residential treatment center for those struggling with addiction. There is very little in the human experience that I’m afraid of, and I’m clear about what I was put here to do:
I bring presence, compassion, and awareness to the space where human beings connect,
in order to look at all that is challenging, frightening, and troubling in our lives.
In this space negative emotions are neutralized, doubt is replaced with clarity, and love fills the places that were clogged by fear.
WHAT I DO
GUIDING THE MIND, HEART, & BODY
I work with adolescents, young adults, and individuals that need guidance in aligning the mind, the heart, and the body to bring balance to their lives. My definition of mental and emotional wellness is to have a neutral place within, from which I can experience a wide range of emotions — fear, rage, peace, joy — feel them fully, then return to the neutral place of mindful presence. This approach is particularly effective for those struggling with addiction, depression, anxiety, and the emotional residue of traumatic events in the past. I am well-versed in the modalities of EMDR and Somatic Psychotherapy which help to free our nervous systems from the emotional wounds of a lifetime.
We will begin by examining the current use of your “Human Operating System,” or how the mind, heart, and body are working together to make choices and respond to the consequences of those choices. We will also look at the “story” that you tell about your life, and determine which parts of that story are no longer serving your pursuit of what you want in your life. This will help us collaborate on a treatment plan of implementing practices that can help you make changes, as slowly and gradually as you wish, to gain a feeling that things are back on track. Our work focuses on learning to observe, regulate and tolerate emotions, so that the emotional system becomes a guidance system rather than a dark mess of pain that we repress or run from.
You will find me to be a patient, compassionate, and open listener, allowing you the space and respect to communicate your inner world in an atmosphere of safety without judgement.
You are safe here, and you have everything you need to make the changes you desire.
WHY I DO IT
FILLING THE GAP
Our culture has traditionally paid little attention to teaching us about the emotional system — what it is, what it does, and how we might use it with maximum effectiveness — and I see my role as filling that gap in our educational system. Our schools address the intellectual realm by stuffing our heads with facts, figures, and formulas, and we may learn to use our bodies through organized athletics. Our parents may have given us excellent emotional advice like, “Stop complaining,” or “Suck it up,” or “Quit crying or I’ll give you something to cry about.” So it’s no wonder that most of us are at a loss when it comes to understanding and working with our emotions.
So the work of helping people become “three-centered beings,” or humans that operate from a balance in mind, heart, and body, is more than just an exercise in helping people feel better. It is work that is vitally important to the future of our culture and our world. We need to graduate from the realm of opinion into the realm of compassion — a process continually blocked by fear, anger, ridicule and hate. If we as individuals can learn to feel our feelings, then we are more prone to allow others to feel theirs.
This creates an atmosphere of mutual respect and empathy,
and a world that I want my children to grow up in.
WHAT I BELIEVE
PHOENIX STORIES
We’re not talking about a city in Arizona, we’re talking about one of the most fascinating aspects of mythology, the powerful bird that goes up in flames and then rises again from the ashes. Tina Garnet writes in The Phoenix in Egyptian, Arab, & Greek Mythology of the long-lived bird, “When it feels its end approaching, it builds a nest with the finest aromatic woods, sets it on fire, and is consumed by the flames. From the pile of ashes, a new Phoenix arises, young and powerful. It then embalms the ashes of its predecessor in an egg of myrrh, and flies to the city of the Sun, Heliopolis, where it deposits the egg on the altar of the Sun God.” (Thanks to ancient-origins.net for the reference.
What is it about this ancient symbol that is so alluring to the human imagination? Certainly the cycle of death and rebirth is vital to the biological survival of the species, but it goes far deeper than that. What needs to “die” in our lives is our attachment to the idea that our egoic pursuits and misplaced desires are going to bring us the happiness and fulfillment we so desperately crave! If we think that a new job or a new drug or a new relationship is going to bring us contentment, and we haven’t changed anything on the inside, we are simply going to play out the same patterns again and again.
When we come to the point of being ready to burn down the patterns that have led to so much futility and suffering, we “prepare the nest” of a new life to rise from those ashes. Notice that the Phoenix does not blow the old ashes into the wind with a cry of, “Good riddance!” No, it honors its past, no matter how painful, by placing it on the Altar of the Sun. We can be grateful for the challenges and difficulties that brought us to our knees, because it is that very suffering that prepared the way for necessary changes to occur.
Phoenix stories are the most powerful stories I know. I have lived them, and I have observed them, and I have helped those who are ready write those stories for themselves.