SCHNASE Thea

My therapeutic approach is warm, collaborative, curious, and compassionate, and I tailor my work toward the needs of each client. Together, we can create an approach to counseling that works for you. My goal is to offer you a supportive space for you to share the stories of who you are. I will listen with deep respect and compassion, and will offer you observations, reflections, feedback, and tools. In this space, you can come to know and appreciate yourself more fully, grow in new ways, reconnect to your own deep knowing, and build resilience and new capacities to inhabit your life in ways that work for you.

This process is active, collaborative, creative, and dynamic, and we will be learning and discovering together. I value your autonomy and trust your input as to what does and does not work for you.

Relationships are at the heart of how I orient to the world and my work—relationships with family and friends, partners, selves, community, cultures and identities, systems of oppression and privilege, work and purpose, bodies, spirituality, and nature. These relationships shape the ways we understand and experience the world and ourselves, and are at the core of our joys, sufferings, inspirations, and challenges. Counseling is a powerful way to understand these relationships more deeply, and to make intentional changes in how we experience and participate in them.

My practice is sex-positive, kink-friendly, and affirming of all genders and sexualities. I am experienced with non-monogamy and welcome a diversity of consensual relationship styles and structures. My work is trauma-informed and intersectional. I am committed to anchoring my work in anti-oppression and social justice/collective liberation. This work is life-long and ongoing. I am always learning, and I welcome feedback from my clients about all aspects of our work together. I understand individual healing as an important part of collective liberation and cultural transformation.

I am guided by person-centered and strengths-based counseling, feminist and narrative therapies, attachment theory, family systems theory, Lifespan Integration therapy, solution focused and existential therapies, ecopsychology, cognitive behavioral theory, somatic/body awareness, mind/body integration, and expressive therapies.

I have a masters degree in counseling psychology from Saint Martin’s University, where I studied individual, couple and family counseling within a systemic framework. I have an undergraduate degree from University of Washington, where I studied social justice movements, identity, and community stewardship. I am currently supervised by Carol Pendleton, MA, LMFT, LMHC, CMHS.

I have worked in the field of direct service social work since 2003, working primarily with houseless and elder communities and new parents. I love reading and writing, being a parent, spending time in the woods and in my garden, making lists, growing flowers, watching birds and bugs, drinking tea, being with the people I love, and trying to get to the heart of the matter. I move toward relationship, depth, and meaning, and come alive for stories of community and transformation. I love human beings, in all of our messy imperfection.

I live and work on the unceded land of the Indigenous People of the Medicine Creek Treaty, including the Coast Salish, Chehalis, Cowlitz, Nisqually, and Squaxin Peoples, who are the traditional custodians of the land on which I am an uninvited guest. These lands are currently known as Olympia, Littlerock and Rochester, Washington.

I am grateful to my many teachers—past and present. My work is guided and informed by my relationship with plants, the land, and all of the creatures who inhabit our world.