Everybody can heal and grow.

Ryen McGrath, LPC, NCC, MS

 

My Approach

Narrative Therapy

As a narrative therapist, I believe every individual has the capacity to heal and grow. Our language, stories, and images help shape our experience of ourselves and the world. Understanding these can help us heal.

People develop throughout life, not only in childhood. Our experiences, thoughts, emotions, and body sensations shape the stories that define our lives. So do our relationships with people, groups, cultures, and systems. When we use narrative therapy to understand, experience, re-process, and re-imagine our stories, we can heal and grow in the places where we have gotten stuck.

Narrative therapy takes a non-blaming approach to mental health symptoms, interpersonal struggles, and actions that no longer serve. Just as our stories can keep us stuck, our stories can help us heal. With narrative therapy, nobody exists alone: we are all affected in complex ways by the people, environments, and systems around us.

My approach to narrative therapy involves somatic/mindfulness work to help clients contact emotions, thoughts, and body sensations in the present moment; exploring stories about the self, others, the world, and the future that may be limiting growth or contributing to suffering; and helping the client re-story their experiences in ways that honor their identities, strengths, values, and resiliency. Techniques can include present moment awareness, talk therapy, movement, creative arts experiences, play/experiential exercises, skill-building, and more.

Africana Worldview Model

The Africana Worldview Model is a way of thinking and interacting based on the work of scholars in the Afrikan Studies movement.* In counseling, the Africana Worldview Model provides a set of principles that guide my counseling practice and my approach to life. Some of these principles are:

  • Afrikan Axiology: Being together, being in nature, and being in the present moment are important parts of healing and growth.

  • Afrikan Epistemology: I honor my clients’ intuition. I honor my clients’ innate knowledge. I honor my clients’ physical experience in the world.

  • Afrikan Ideology: Supporting my clients’ self-advocacy is an ethical obligation. Change is non-linear and sometimes cyclical. Progress is not the only way to measure positive outcomes.

  • Afrikan Logic: Trusting, respectful therapeutic relationships are at the center of the counseling process. I acknowledge that everyone’s perspective is subjective, including mine. I strive to respect my clients’ perspective, remaining curious and open to new understanding.

  • Afrikan Teleology: Clients are entitled to know the practical details, such as what counseling will be like, the purpose of the interventions we choose, any known risks or challenges, and how long the process might take.

Equity and Justice

Issues of social justice and equity are built into my counseling practice. Our identities and our experiences in the systems around us affect our lives in profound ways. Often, our challenges are related to factors outside ourselves, and part of social justice work in counseling is exploring how these factors impact clients’ struggles.

I believe people heal in relationships. The therapeutic relationship between a client and a counselor is an intentional space where the client can have healing emotional and interpersonal experiences. I consider how power and privilege affect our relationship as counselor and client, as well as how power and privilege affect our worldviews, language, experiences, and understanding. Part of my work is to understand where I hold power, where you as the client hold power, and how we can work together to support you.

Mental health and healing are for everybody. One of my goals is to increase access to high-quality, culturally appropriate counseling for all people, especially people with marginalized identities. We can work together to advocate for you, within your counseling experience and beyond.

About My Practice

People may seek counseling when they feel stuck, when they are struggling with something, or when they want to heal and grow. Each person is the expert on their own experience. My practice is trauma-informed, and I strive to honor the dignity, autonomy, and connectedness of clients who identify as members of marginalized groups. If I seem like a good fit for you, we can work together to increase insight, tap into self-compassion, and discover skills that can help you reach your goals.

I believe that working with humans means working with trauma, so I use the principles of trauma-informed care and the Africana Worldview Model in all my work. My practice is infused with principles of social justice and multicultural counseling. In addition to narrative therapy, I use ideas and tools from acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), and internal family systems (IFS). I use somatic and mindfulness (body and mind) approaches to help clients access the power of their senses, thoughts, and emotions to promote wellness. I take a neuroscientific approach to understanding the body, the brain, and how a person’s experience of their own body can shift over time as they heal.

One of my goals as a trans therapist is to co-create space with trans, nonbinary, two-spirit, and questioning clients to explore and develop their identities, heal, and grow. I work with individuals of all racial and ethnic identities. As a white counselor, I am acutely aware of how my racial identity may affect counseling relationships, and I am committed to creating supportive, effective therapeutic relationships with BIPOC clients. I strive to provide affirming care to clients of all body sizes, abilities, and disabilities. I am sex-positive and queer friendly, and I support asexual and demisexual clients, as well as those who are polyamorous, non-monogamous, and/or kink-identified.

I can write letters of support for gender-affirming procedures and for emotional support animals (ESA) for outpatient clients.

About Me

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My name is Ryen (he/him). I respect the fact that you are seeking counseling, and I look forward to learning about you - your values, strengths, needs, history, and goals. I was born and raised here in Portland, Oregon. I identify as a white, bisexual, trans man who is temporarily able-bodied and straight-sized. My experience of holding both privileged and marginalized identities informs my counseling practice.

I will soon start seeing clients for individual outpatient counseling via telehealth (online). Please check back in October, 2024. As a counseling intern, I worked with individual adult clients at Owls’ Nest North, a clinic dedicated to serving LGBTQ+ people of all races with limited incomes.

I also see clients in the emergency mental health setting, serving adults experiencing mental health crises including psychosis, mania, trauma responses, and struggles with alcohol, substances, and behaviors.

I am privileged to hold space for other transmasculine and nonbinary people as a volunteer facilitator for a peer support group at Q Center.

I am a member of the American Counseling Association (ACA), the Oregon Counseling Association (ORCA), and the Association for Multicultural Counseling & Development (AMCD). I have taken the Health at Every Size (HAES) Pledge and appear on the HAES Registry.

Licensure and Training

I am a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) and National Certified Counselor (NCC). I work with adult clients, individually and in groups. I hold a Master of Science (MS) degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from Portland State University. My training centered on individual and group counseling with adult clients; gender identity; life transitions, adjustment, and human development; intimacy and sexuality; neurobiology; trauma; multicultural counseling and social justice; and assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of clinical issues like anxiety and depression. I earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. I am bound to the codes of ethics set by the American Counseling Association and the Oregon Board of Licensed Professional Counselors and Therapists (OBLPCT).

* I am grateful to my former clinical supervisor, Dr. Andre Pruitt, PhD, LCSW, for training me in use of the Africana Worldview Model in counseling. The terms discussed above are borrowed with admiration from the following article: Carroll, K.K. (2008). Africana studies and research methodology: Revisiting the centrality of the Afrikan worldview. The Journal of Pan-African Studies 2(2), 4-27.

Professional Disclosure Statement (PDS)

My professional disclosure statement is available here.

For more information about laws, rules, and your rights, please visit the OBLPCT website at oregon.gov/OBLPCT.