Our Approach
What Makes Mend Counseling Approach Unique?
Mend Approaches
Each therapist at Mend brings their own voice, perspective, and training. While we share core values, we draw from different approaches in different ways.
These are not rigid systems, but flexible frameworks that shape how we listen, reflect, and support healing. Depending on each person’s needs, we may lean into one approach or blend several together.
We believe every good therapist should do their own deep work in therapy. Our ability to show up for others depends on how well we’ve learned to show up for ourselves.
Relational
Healing happens in relationship. This approach centers the connection between client and therapist as both a mirror and a path toward growth.
Drawing from the work of Karen Maroda, Jessica Benjamin, Galit Atlas, Stephen Mitchell, and Lewis Aron, it explores how early patterns shape current relationships and how change can unfold through honest, meaningful connection.
The relationship itself becomes part of the healing, offering new experiences of trust, repair, and emotional presence.
Existential
Existential therapy invites us to face life’s biggest questions with honesty and curiosity. Mortality, freedom, meaning, and isolation are not abstract ideas but lived experiences that shape how we move through the world.
Influenced by Irvin Yalom, Viktor Frankl, Friedrich Nietzsche, James Baldwin, and Rollo May, this approach explores what it means to live with intention, even without certainty.
Rather than offering answers, it creates space for reflection, choice, and connection. It helps people clarify their values and live with more honesty and purpose.
Inclusivity & Liberation
We celebrate the richness of human diversity across race, gender, sexuality, ability, religion, class, and relationship structures. We work to create a space where all identities are seen, respected, and valued.
We recognize that unconscious bias, privilege, and systems of oppression shape our lives in complex ways. We are committed to ongoing personal work that includes examining ourselves.
Therapy can be a space to reclaim voice, explore identity, and challenge the messages we have been taught to carry.
Narrative
We all carry stories. They speak to who we are, what we have lived through, and what is possible for us.
Narrative therapy invites people to explore and reshape those stories with intention and care. Instead of seeing problems as personal flaws, this approach views them as shaped by culture, experience, and the language we use.
Through that process, clients uncover strength and meaning. They begin to move through the present with more clarity and freedom.
EMDR
EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. It is a structured approach to help people process painful or traumatic memories while staying connected to the present moment.
Developed by Francine Shapiro, EMDR uses bilateral stimulation such as eye movements, tapping, or sound. These methods support the brain in integrating past experiences that once felt stuck or overwhelming.
This process can reduce emotional distress and create more space for resilience, clarity, and healing.
IFS & Parts Work
At different points in life, we adapt in order to survive. Over time, those adaptations form distinct parts of us, each with its own voice, purpose, and story.
Internal Family Systems (IFS), developed by Richard Schwartz, helps us build relationships with these parts instead of pushing them away. When we listen with curiosity, they begin to trust one another and work together.
Healing happens when we can lead from our core self. That inner self carries the calm, clarity, and compassion needed to hold all of who we are.
Person Centered
Healing begins when we are seen, heard, and accepted as we are. Person-centered therapy, developed by Carl Rogers, is built on the belief that people grow best in the presence of empathy, authenticity, and unconditional positive regard.
Rather than focusing on what's “wrong,” this approach trusts each person's inner capacity for growth. The therapist offers a grounded, nonjudgmental space where people can explore their experience and move toward greater self-understanding and wholeness.
Somatic
Our bodies hold the imprint of what we have lived through. Tension, shutdown, or overwhelm often show up in the body before we can put them into words.
Somatic therapy helps us listen to those signals with curiosity instead of judgment. Influenced by the work of Peter Levine, Bessel van der Kolk, and Pat Ogden, this approach supports people in gently releasing stored survival responses.
As we learn to soothe the nervous system, we create more space for insight, connection, and resilience.