Practical, in-depth psychotherapy
No matter how daunting, complex, or misunderstood the circumstances, I help adults, young adults, and couples achieve their mental health, relationship, and general life goals.
Greetings and salutations!
Ben Bjorgaard, PhDc, MA, LMHC, LPC, LMFTA, RCC
Traversing through the trials you’re facing to reach the life you envision is one of the most challenging, exciting, and worthwhile adventures you can take. Alas, life throws stressors— and then some—at you without providing the adequate time and supports needed to respond to them. Although you do your best, these burdens accumulate and take their toll—factoring into your own unique brand of suffering, roadblocks, and discontent. This can slap blinders on that keep you from enjoying what life and your relationships have to offer. After a while, it can start to feel like you’re trudging through fog, unable to see more than a few feet ahead. That’s where I come in—I’m here to clear the fog, take off the blinders, prepare you for the next leg of your journey, and accompany you on the road.
Expertise for overcoming life’s perils
Sometimes you just need someone to talk to—preferably someone non-judgmental, present, caring, and skilled—seemingly simple conversations with the right person can help to unpack, reorganize, and release the burdens we carry around with us. Seeking supportive dialogue is a healthy part of being human and an admirable action to take when you need a hand.
I provide online psychotherapy, couples therapy, and therapeutic coaching. My goal is that you will come to feel whole, connected, and purposeful through our work together. I believe shared humor and a genuine connection with your therapist are crucial for effective therapy.
Therapy is a space for you to explore your self, your preferences, your conflicts, and your action plans, in order to create a life where your individuality can flourish. I am dedicated to helping you overcome adversities, heal old wounds, and resolve outdated patterns so that you can grow into yourself with greater skill, choice, and intention. Most importantly, I am here to help you get where you want to go.
I recognize that looking for a therapist can be a stressor at what could be an already be a vulnerable time in your life. Not knowing exactly what to say or ask is okay—that’s what I’m here for, to help with the first steps of your journey.
I'm not here to:
tell you what you want to hear,
make your story conform to pre-existing labels or diagnostic categories,
or subject you to canned therapy interventions or the next up-and-coming, half-baked therapeutic approach.
Life doesn't fit into boxes, and neither do you or your relationships.
That’s why I practice:
Integrative psychotherapy
I don’t adhere to a singular, contrived therapeutic approach. Instead, based on your feedback and my expertise, I custom design a therapy just for you. Being a long-time psychotherapy nerd helps me collaborate effectively and suss out what will work best for you.
Integrative psychotherapy starts with efficacious principles common across all therapeutic approaches. Then, it adapts to you and matches particular strategies to each stage of your journey. This way, you experience progress rather than feeling like you’re going in circles, hitting dead ends, or practicing something you’ve tried before. If something is not working or feeling quite right at any given time, we’ll re-route and find a better path.
Integrative psychotherapy sees you as an evolving whole and avoids defining you and the issues you’d like to address through a single, limited point-of-view.
Personally, I’d rather focus on you having a rewarding experience in therapy than on applying a standardized set of techniques. How about you?
For complex problems of living
Life’s trials and tribulations are far from straightforward; no terminology or diagnostic category is exact. This is especially the case when it comes to your mental health. Problems of living are messy and systemic—with multiple ways to define and understand them, multiple ways to resolve and address them, and multiple causes that occur in cycles and feedback loops.
The danger is that many methods of explaining and responding to problems of living can be reductive, and postpone deeper solutions or even create whole new problems of their own.
In order to best respond to problems of living, we need to ground them within the rich context of your life, mind, history, desires, beliefs, and values. Then, we can find our bearings within the unique geography of your life and formulate a clear map for what’s to come. It's all part of the adventure to someplace new and reinvigorating.
From a social constructionist perspective
Your struggles are intimately tied to the sociocultural systems you’re immersed in. They are not merely psychological or neurobiological; they are social and socially constructed. It can pay off to explore how language and culture—and the assumptions embedded within them—factor into your distress.
This includes how you are impacted by forms of power intrinsic to institutions and organizations, media, education, and social and family relations, such as:
authority, violence, and force,
ideologies, beliefs, myths, discourse, and persuasion
values, norms, taboos, ethics, desires, aesthetics, and priorities
money and material power,
laws, rules, ethics, rituals, and conventions,
biological and embodied power,
cultural capital and status,
interpersonal, family, social, and organizational dynamics,
knowledge and information,
overt and covert oppression, discrimination, and persecution,
whose voice is heard, whose experience is validated, and whose interpretation of events is deemed true.
All these, and more, set you up to experience adversities like distress, threat, and insecurity. In turn, these can have cumulative adverse impacts on your mental health—or simply fail to provide you with the supports needed to adapt and thrive.
This perspective also includes how you may habitually perpetuate ideas and perspectives that obstruct your life and journey. Many of your struggles may result from ways you internalize things that have been made up in one way or another. This can be a form of self-sabotage by keeping yourself stuck in negative feedback loops.
This is not the only perspective we might take together, but it is important to keep in mind, because when you understand how elements of your struggles may be socially constructed, you can be freer to create new experiences with less to hold you back. Taking off shackles the world has led you to believe are your lot in life can be hugely liberating.
Why intrepid?
The word “intrepid” encapsulates some of my core values—as both a psychotherapist and a person.
To me, intrepidity is about uncovering your inner resources and challenging yourself to strengthen them, such as courage, determination, fearlessness, and daring. Think of this as cultivating an approach and growth mindset—versus an avoidance and fixed mindset. This can help you:
confront whatever is holding you back.
take positive action despite anxiety and fears.
withstand adversities, tragedies, and mistakes—including those that can evoke guilt, shame, and self-persecution.
stand up to enduring patterns of self-sabotage and break free of them.
accept past and present circumstances in order to focus on constructive ways forward.
take accountability when warranted, even when it is difficult.
assert yourself when your boundaries are crossed, and when you need to stand up for your own or someone else’s needs.
prevent your perceived imperfections and inner critic from getting in the way of your strengths, purpose, and contributions.
stay with and ride out challenging emotions in order to master them and be enlivened by them.
befriend the unknown; turn confusion to understanding and uncertainty to mystery by fostering your creativity and intuition.
focus on what you can learn and carry forward from experiences, even when they're overwhelming.
communicate directly and effectively.
disclose and stand by your personal experience, even when others might invalidate it
Intrepidity is also about cultivating an appetite for adventure, and essentially life itself, to counteract socially instilled values of productivity and materialism. This can involve savoring states of novelty, relaxation, recreation, connection, self-expression, learning, engagement, exploration, play, pleasure, levity, and joy—experiences that are innately fulfilling. These positive experiences are so easily left by the wayside due to modern stressors—pressures to keep your nose on the grindstone that leave you drained, trudging through the daily grind of unappreciated labor.
This can also involve connecting with yourself and prioritizing time to reflect, journal, and self-innovate. Taking the time to discover and listen to all the parts of yourself, including your body and imagination, can lead to a deeper awareness of your own voice, rather than only hearing the constant narration of you inner taskmaster.
Last but not least, intrepidity is about nourishing your sense of humor and a spirit that is authentic, at ease, and good-company. One that appreciates the tragedy, irony, comedy, and drama of life, so that you can experience life fully and gracefully. Sometimes this involves a playful or humorous way of looking at things, and at other times, looking at the big picture. This can grant a capacity to experiment with different points of view, and when the need arises, to stand out from the crowd and dissent—to be critical and irreverent. The intrepid spirit can bolster you by grounding you in the camaraderie of shared human experience, while also acknowledging the sanctity and value of your unique experience.