About
Artful Growth Counseling is an expressive arts based practice geared toward serving the community. Its mission is to spread affirmation and awaken the spirit of creativity and play as means to heal and nurture the soul.
You:
You may be weary, anxious, angry, uncertain, or feeling rough around the edges and that’s okay. We’re here to help navigate and explore with you.
What to expect: We will talk, write, laugh, cry, be in silence, create sand trays, make drawings and paintings, contemplate, adjust, find our way.
(Not all at once of course and geared toward what works best for you.)
Hello & Welcome to Artful Growth Counseling PLLC.
Our mission here at Artful Growth is to provide a space that sparks inspiration and offers warmth and comfort. To be genuine in our offerings and nurture creativity in many forms. We believe in the therapeutic relationship as the powerful connector that assists growth and understanding.
I’ve been working this scene since 2007 and have immense gratitude and respect for the lives and stories that have crossed my path. From community organizations, foster care systems, adults with disabilities in day centers, nursing homes, inpatient psychiatric hospital work, and group private practice I have gained multiple perspectives and strengthened work ethic throughout this time. I am so happy to come back to my roots of creative makings with hopes to expand the importance of creative musings in a therapy setting.
My approach is down to earth and humanistic with a good sense of humor so together we can build a strong working therapeutic relationship. We can tackle unhelpful thinking patterns, establish healthy risk taking, find buried and under-utilized strengths, focus on problem solving and growth, strengthen connections with others, and ultimately rediscover self through learning new things.
I use a combination of theoretical concepts largely from Adlerian Theory and I also pull from Neuroscience and Sensorimotor approaches to assist with integrating healing components; ultimately to contribute to wellbeing and provide a solution-focused outlook. Adlerian theoretical concepts, such as the importance of belonging, understanding the influence between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to make shifts in how life is approached, and gaining more awareness of overall life patterns is my foundational approach to structuring treatment. Neuroscience to gather information and provide understanding, and Sensorimotor approaches to strengthen attunement and navigate an intuitive self lens. And within these approaches I use art, sand tray, play, and talk to navigate the course of therapy.
Andrea received her bachelor’s degree from The Maryland Institute College of Art, and her Master’s degree from Adler University. She has extensive training focused on sand tray work and is working toward a certificate of program completion of a 10 level training program from The Sand Tray Training Institute of New Mexico.
I strongly believe in the importance of developing + nurturing a felt sense of belonging in helping us navigate through life, and this is a significant aspect of my work in helping people gain strides within this attachment piece.
The Logo:
A tree ring represents a single year’s growth. Did you know that valuable information can be gathered from looking at tree rings? Like what the weather was like for promoting such growth, or lack thereof. Scars can be visible within a ring from a variety of happenings. It encompasses a full range of experience much like the daily occurrences of our own lives. As we invite ourselves to take a closer look inward, we may also find and then nurture valuable messages to further our own growth.
Book a Free Consultation
This is your chance, take it! Let’s connect so we can explore all of the many possibilities available in your life. We can help navigate next steps, answer questions, and target needs. This short consultation can give you the direction you crave to begin seeing yourself as the strongest component in making life more manageable and aligned with you.
Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do. Make good art.
― Neil Gaiman