Embodied & Relational

My hope as a counselor is to support you in remembering the clearest insight comes from your own direct experience. My role is to support presence and attending to your whole self in this practice.

About Me

Welcome! I’m Tom Strickland (he/him). I grew up in the oak and granite foothills of Northern California and was a student and steward of California’s Central Coast from 2007-2015. With experience as a farmer, arborist, educator, wilderness therapy guide, and mental health provider, I integrate my love for Earth and community in my work as a licensed professional counselor. I am driven by an insatiable and playful curiosity for life and our authentic relationships with ourselves, each other, and place. 

I live on the Eastern slope of the Cascades in Central Oregon where I practice as a Gestalt therapist in community mental health. I have been working in Gestalt process groups since 2012 when I apprenticed at Esalen Institute in Big Sur over the course of 3 years.

A lifelong student of awareness, dialogue, and somatic-emotional process, I guest lecture on Gestalt therapy for masters level counseling students at Oregon State University- Cascades. I am engaged in ongoing study and practice with Pacific Gestalt Institute as part of an international cohort of Gestalt therapists.

I am passionate about working in groups to increase choice, coherence, and to embrace fallibility as part of our essential humanity and as a necessary condition for metabolizing systemic shame, isolation, and disconnection.

I work with adults, teens 15+, families, and couples. I feel honored to have experience working with people from diverse cultural backgrounds with a wide range of identities, values and beliefs. I appreciate learning alongside each client and respect each person’s unique path in the world.

Because I am limited to an awareness and understanding rooted in my own history and cultural background, each session is also an opportunity for me to learn and expand my perspectives on the nature of people, the common and unique challenges we face, how we access hope, resilience and a sense of community within different cultures, and what creates a shared sense of humanity.

I currently live with my partner Maija and our dog Obi.

Philosophy

I believe in honoring the wisdom of our various life experiences and perspectives. 

Increasing awareness of the creative (and sometimes outdated) adjustments we make to life’s stressors can support a sense of agency in how we respond to new challenges, losses and opportunities in our ever-evolving relational environments.

Compassionate curiosity and the development of appropriate interpersonal boundaries moves our work towards greater responsibility, clarity of choice, purpose, and coherence of self-in-relation.

Approach

In individual, couples, family, and group therapy I employ an integrative approach informed primarily by Gestalt theory, compassionate awareness practices, and EMDR.

  • Gestalt is an awareness and therapeutic practice based on attending to what is happening in the present moment:

    What we feel in our body.

    What we notice in our breathing and gestures.

    What we are aware of in other people and our environment.

  • I am trained in EMDR for treating acute, relational and developmental trauma.

    EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing)

    EMDR involves understanding client history and life context, developing supports (grounding and affect management skills), building a treatment plan, processing of traumatic experiences to lower the intensity of activating images, emotions, sensations, and beliefs, and strengthening adaptive information processing for past, present, and future stressors.

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Education & Training

Contemporary Relational Gestalt Theory & Practice- Pacific Gestalt Institute- Los Angeles (2024-Present)

Integrating EMDR Into Your Clinical Practice- EMDR Consultants- Bend (2024)

Power of the Body in Treating Trauma- Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Institute- Broomfield (2023)

Master of Counseling- Clinical Mental Health Counseling- Oregon State University- Cascades (2023)

Apprenticeship and Co-facilitation in Relational Gestalt Practice with Dorothy Charles and Wildtender- Esalen Institute- Big Sur (2012-Present)

Bachelor of Science- Economics with Sustainable Environments Minor - Cal Poly San Luis Obispo (2011)