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Ariel Gonzales, MA, LPC-Associate
Supervised by Peta-Gay Ledbetter, LPC-S
Ariel is trained in EMDR, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy,
CBT, and Solution-Focused Therapy.
When coming to a therapist website, everything can feel really overwhelming. Is this person right for me, how will I know… Well let me give you a few scenarios, and see if this is you:
It’s late, you are struggling to get to sleep. You roll over and roll back. This continues for what seems like forever. You try squeezing your eyes shut but when you do you see their face.Your eyes open and tears spring from the corners and once again you cry yourself to sleep.
Then you hear it, that faint sound of a beep, you try hard to keep dreaming but the harsh reality of 6:00 am on a Monday hits you all over again. The tightness in your chest feels like an overweight cat sitting on you, but you get up anyway. The feeling never leaves, day in and day out. You start to dread going to sleep, but you dread waking up even more. All you want is for everything to go back to normal, but you don’t even know what normal is now. The phrases "move on", "you’ll get over it", "it’s been x amount of years how are you still sad", constantly berate you from those around you. All you can think is well SH*T for me it feels like it happened only a few moments ago and not as though years have passed.
Frozen in time is where you are too afraid to move on, too afraid to look back, too afraid to face the truths in front of you. There is no logic to grief, there is no timeline, there is just living in the unmatched silence of it. The silence can be deafening at first, that silence can be so uncomfortable that your being does not comprehend how to sit in it. So together we can work on sitting with the silence, breaking down the worry, confronting the bittersweet reality that is now your life. We’ll work on “the grief stages” but we’ll also tackle whatever emotions that present themselves to us.
Or perhaps you were the young child who's parents often told you, you are too emotional, push down your feelings, stop crying and suck it up. Did this leave you to feel as though having emotions was bad? Did this cause you to bottle up your emotions and keep them stored away for a rainy day? Did you have to make everything perfect, but you procrastinated till the last minute. Do you feel as though you are emotionally raw, drained, or burned out? If so let's take a journey together to untangle yourself from all the triggers and bad sh*t, and emotional burdens and find YOU.
I practice from a person-centered approach, while utilizing modalities such as CBT(Cognitive Behavioral Therapy), DBT (Dialectical Behavioral Therapy) and Solution-Focused Therapy. I believe everyone is just looking to find a way back to their true selves, we just forget what that looks like sometimes.
I am a Licensed Professional Counselor-Associate. I am a graduate of Baylor University with a Bachelor’s of Art in Psychology and Sociology. I earned my Master’s of Science in Mental Health Counseling from the University of Houston-Clear Lake. I am a member of Chi Sigma Iota - Upsilon Chi Lambda chapter.
Counseling does not have to be stuffy or boring or a chore. It can be fun, it can be eye opening, and it can lead to a better understanding of who you are. It can also have a lot of pop culture references. I am not the wizard behind the curtain nor am I the end all be all to counseling, but if you are willing to follow the yellow brick road and find your way back home to yourself then let’s do that together.
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