Counseling in Navarre, Florida

Mission Statement

The HAVEN Place is a place of safety, a special place with a particular purpose ... hope, healing, and recovery.

Call (850) 684-3059 today!

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What sets me apart from other therapists? To start with, I pay attention to eight aspects of wellness (mental, emotional, spiritual, physical, biological, sexual, psychological, social). I work with my clients to identify and address problems in each of these areas to help them restore emotional and physical harmony.

Focusing on what’s happened to you vs. what’s wrong with you, I’ll apply my unique blend of experience, training, and skills in two primary areas: relationships – with individuals, couples, and families – and PTSD / trauma.

Our pasts can and do intrude, changes do happen, and both can lead to problems affecting multiple aspects of our lives. I’ve helped hundreds of people regain their lives, and I feel confident I can help you as well.

First, I don’t focus on mental health disorders – what’s wrong with you. Instead, we’ll focus on what’s happened to you – the underlying causes – and your reactions. Whether there’s past trauma, substance use, environmental problems, etc., there’s always an underlying reason for a person’s problems and behavior. If we don’t address those underlying factors, recovery never happens and the problem only gets worse.

Second, we stay focused on your initial problems through structured therapy. While we’ll work together on new problems as they arise, we’ll always keep our eyes on your primary problem areas.

In doing so, you, like most clients I’ve worked with over the years – couples and individuals – may experience significant improvement. Many of my past clients initially met criteria for PTSD / trauma. They commonly improved 30 points or more compared to their pre-therapy scores in 10 or so sessions and no longer met criteria for PYTSD or trauma.

These clients had a renewed sense of calmness, self-control, joy, inner peace, purpose and meaning in their lives. They were happy with their results and moved on with their lives.

Key Contacts

Ray Sizemore

Business Owner

1) Couples Therapy

Relationships aren’t easy. Even the strongest couples can struggle under the weight of everyday issues like finances, sex, children, social media and more.

These points of contention can lead to a lack of emotional and physical intimacy, a break down of respect and trust for each other, and diminished companionship and communication.I’ll help you to help each other; rebuild mutual respect, trust, and honesty; understand what’s not working and why; develop mutual solutions for your problems; and re-experience friendship and simple joy of just being with each other.

Together, we’ll address communication, companionship, respect trust, honesty, boundaries, and emotional and physical intimacy. We’ll share expectations, assumptions, and relationship needs. We’ll compare individual and shared values, goals, and beliefs.
We’ll explore how past trauma and all the baggage you’ve each brought to the relationship are affecting who you are and how you live as a couple. And finally, we’ll examine your physical health and discover how improved health can enhance your relationship, as well.

2) Therapy For One

Feel lost in the crowd – faceless, voiceless, like no one cares, nothing will ever get better?
Know something’s wrong, missing in your life, but haven’t been able to fix it?

Maybe you’ve had one or more failed relationships, or you’re in a bad relationship right now.No matter how hard you tried, nothing really worked. In fact, the more you tried, the more exhausted and overwhelmed you felt.

Maybe those same patterns are spilling over into relationships with your kids, your parents, or your siblings. But you have no idea why this keeps happening or what to do about it.
You feel stuck. Nothing works, and you’re left to pick up the pieces – for yourself and others. Or perhaps you’re angry, socially withdrawn, or just lonely – perhaps you want, yet can’t handle, connection with others. We’ll address important areas including companionship, respect, trust, boundaries, and emotional and physical intimacy.
We’ll discuss your relationship needs, expectations, assumptions, values, goals, and beliefs.

We’ll explore communication, baggage, and past trauma. And we’ll examine your physical health, as well.

I can offer you a safe place to work through your problems. With kindness, humor, and insight, we’ll work together to discover answers to why you’re experiencing problems and then work together on solutions.

Bottom line? I’ve worked with hundreds of individuals, couples, and families, and I can help.

3) Trauma And Ptsd

Imagine you’re stressed out, can’t concentrate, can’t sleep. You feel confused, your mind always racing. You alternate between emotional numbness and wild mood swings or anger issues. You worry constantly. Might live for an adrenaline rush and can’t wait to feel a thrill, so you engage in risky or even dangerous behaviors. Perhaps you often react badly to situation after situation, yet have no idea why. Or maybe you have ongoing struggles with mental health and substance use. Substances may have helped for a time, but they have their own drawbacks.

No matter which scenario describes you, you feel out of control. You’ve tried psych meds, mental health therapy, substance rehab. But nothing has really worked, and now, your problems are affecting your work, relationships, and health. Maybe there’s an underlying reason why.

Trauma can be virtually anything you can’t cope with physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually at the time – anything that interferes with your life – weeks, months, or even years later. Trauma lies not so much in the event but in the way you perceived and reacted to it. And past trauma is all too often an underlying and untreated cause for a host of other problems.

Trauma effects are cumulative. The more traumas we’ve experienced, the more likely we are to be affected. And few people have experienced only one traumatic event.

Common trauma reactions can involve a bewildering mix of physical, behavioral, mental, emotional, spiritual, relational and social contributors. Reactions can be sudden and acute, but they’re quite often gradual. They may not materialize for weeks, months, or even years after a traumatic event. But trauma reactions are not disorders or mental illnesses.
They’re painful yet understandable reactions, survival behaviors, to abnormal events.
And everyone can and does have their own unique patterns of reactions.

We’ll use a three-phase, structured approach in treating trauma/PTSD, tailored to your specific needs and type of trauma. One-size-fits-all therapy does not work for the various forms of trauma.

I encourage all my clients to do some form of body-work to address physical reactions to trauma, reactions we often carry around as chronic muscle tension and pain. TRE (tension, stress, and trauma releasing exercises) is my first choice here, but there are other ways.

Finally, you may need medication for initial stability. However, medication doesn’t address underlying causes and should never be used long-term or as the only form of treatment.

Every person is unique, and their needs in terms of treatment will differ. Some people need all three phases plus body-work. Others do just fine and are happy with only the first phase and body-work, or with body-work alone.

Trauma can occur at any point in our lives. It can and does cause life-long problems.
But trauma is fixable, and you can recover.

4) Child Therapy

I don’t do child therapy. I do family therapy, working with the child and his or her parents, because therapy, effective therapy, is a learning process for both children and their parents.

Kids, even teens, are not “little adults.” They don’t and can’t think like adults. They react differently than adults to stress. And they need parents’ help to cope with stress and any associated emotions they encounter in life.

We’ll work in a family context. Mom and Dad, you’ll be involved. Siblings? Extended family? We may need them, too. We’ll start with two assessments: An age-appropriate assessment of the child and assessments for the parents. Together, we’ll develop a family treatment plan and then begin therapy.

What can you expect? Therapy with children and families is usually open-ended. Typically, it will run for 10 sessions but possibly more. We’ll focus initially on safety for the child, parents, and other family members, and then move into specific areas. We’ll focus on what’s happened to the child, not so much on what’s wrong with the child. And we’ll personalize your child’s therapy based on several important variables like your child’s emotional age and developmental stage, mom and dad's marital problems (if any), histories of trauma to the child, either or both parents, or any other member of the family, and others - focusing on what's happened to vs. what might be wrong with your child.

5) Grief & Loss

The only constant in life isn’t just “death and taxes” – it’s change. Let’s face it. We all experience changes in our lives. Some are easy, but some are not. Some leave long-lasting scars and intense emotional pain.

Trauma is all about change. Change we couldn’t deal with effectively in the moment. Change that still affects us now. And a common element of trauma is grief. But grief doesn’t hit us empty-handed. It’s armed with conflicting emotions of anger, shame, guilt, betrayal, self-blame, and more. And it’s not just about death: We grieve lots of things. Loss of innocence – breakups and divorce – aging and loss of physical capabilities – job changes, etc. Any or all of these come with a host of “symptoms” that may resemble mental illness – but aren’t.

William Worden came up with perhaps the best way to deal with grief and loss – four tasks:
1.Learn to accept the reality of the loss, 2. Learn to work through the pain of grief, 3. Learn to adjust to an environment in which the person, capability, etc., is missing, and 4. Learn to relocate the loss emotionally and move on with life.

These tasks aren’t easy. They aren’t stages, as some people have taught. Working through grief and loss is not linear, is not a progressive process, and does not conform to a time frame. There is no right or wrong way to do it, to get over a loss or major change in our lives. Give yourself permission to grieve in your own way – in your own time.

Together, we’ll work through the four tasks.After completing your assessment, we’ll develop your treatment plan. We’ll help you learn and strengthen safety and emotional regulation skills. We’ll dive into therapy to help you learn and grow as a person. I’ll show you 37 ways to work through Worden’s four tasks. They’re proven! They work!

You’ll have to do your homework, but it’s worth it! Depending on your needs and desires, we can do other types of therapy, as well. I specialize in trauma and have helped many people work through a wide array of losses: Childhood abuse and neglect, suicide, guilt and shame, relationship breakups, infidelity to name a few.

You can’t go “home” again. Maybe you can’t go back to the way things were, but you can move forward. And thats something I can help you with.

Service Locations

Counseling Navarre  -  Therapist Navarre  -  Marriage Counseling Navarre
Couple Counseling Navarre  -  Psychotherapy Navarre  -  Anger Management Navarre

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Updated as of 4/18/2024

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