Pacific Paths Counseling
DISCOVER YOUR PATH
Established in Oregon in 2021, Pacific Paths Counseling offers specialized mental health services that are tailored to your individual needs.
Pacific Paths offers a way forward towards a better self and better future. With a holistic and compassionate approach, we can discover your new journey towards healing and harmony.
Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are.
- Gretel Ehrlich
About
Curtis White, LPC
I am an Oregon native that has lived in the great city of Portland for over 10+ years. I received my Bachelors in Psychology from Portland State University and then continued my career goals by receiving my Masters in Clinical Counseling from PSU in 2019. Since then I have worked to build my own private practice and support the Portland community by offering compassionate care and tailored mental health treatment services.
My experiences of being a queer man that grew up in rural Oregon allows me to aid many populations and minorities of my community. I specialize in working with queer and trans individuals that struggle with identity, trauma, and social stigmatization.
My connection to nature and the outdoors is what keeps me grounded and able to find enjoyment in my life. I love to stay active whether it's hiking, camping, forest bathing, nature watching or playing recreational sports in my community. I am also an advocate of physical health and regular exercise for myself and my clients as a form of self-care and de-stresser.
Services
Individual Therapy
We all have experiences of feeling stagnant, imbalanced or disconnected. The path forward ahead can be paved with unsettling uncertainty as you venture into new directions. This can feel like a difficult and isolating journey; yet It is in those instances where we are our most creative and resilient selves.
We often underestimate our own strengths and magnify our fears and anxiety, forcing ourselves to limit choices in life and closing ourselves off to change. When we gain new insight into ourselves and how we connect to the world, we can find new ways to find the next step towards a more authentic life and connection to loved ones.
Growth can be uncomfortable and challenging to endure alone. Healing emotional wounds and recovering from our past can leave us feeling raw, vulnerable, and helpless at times. I work to support you in finding ways to endure and embrace the uncertainty that comes with healing and moving towards a new path of living where pain often blinds us to.
By choosing therapy you are committing to reinvesting in yourself and reconnect with the parts of you that want to be healed. Counseling can be the space to reconnect to these parts and help heal those wounds. I support my clients in providing unconditional compassion, understanding, and knowledge to guide them through their journeys of self discovery.
Specializations
Depression
If you have ever struggled with depression whether it be chronic, cyclical, or seasonal, you understand the difficulty it is to rise above the weight of it in everyday life. One of the biggest challenges of treating and addressing depression is finding the motivation to engage in the things that you know will make you feel better, the things you used to enjoy. Many often isolate or distract themselves from their pain through unhealthy and unhelpful coping mechanisms. That's where therapy can step in and reinforce your commitment to your mental health and have someone in your corner keeping you accountable and motivating you to take those small steps towards self-actualization and self-compassion.
Anxiety
Feeling anxious or on edge for long periods of time drastically takes a toll on our mental and physical health. Prolonged states of distress cause our nervous system and keep us in a state of hyper-vigelance. This primes our brain to be on high-alert for any perceived threats or dangers; real or imagined. This traps us in a cycle of fear and avoidance leading to overreactions to normal amounts of stress in our daily life. By engaging in therapy, I can support you in better understanding how your mind and body react to stress through somatic and emotional awareness. I support my clients in developing the necessary coping and self-regulating skills necessary to reduce the intensity and frequency of their anxiety. By engaging in therapy we can learn to attune to your body’s reaction to stress and actively work in session to develop these skills as well as addressing the underlying causes of heightened levels of anxiety.
Trauma
Adverse childhood experiences or childhood trauma leaves lasting imprints on our mind, body, and spirit. These shadows of our past can continue to affect our ability to connect with others, ourselves and even our own aspirations. Many of us were not equipped to handle such harmful events and unable to process them fully while the mind is still developing. This leads us to survive by any means necessary, often causing us to form unhealthy coping mechanisms that we still subconsciously use to this day. This can also lead us to have difficulties maintaining relationships, feeling safe and secure, and finding our true self that is not enmeshed with our trauma. Therapy can be the safe space for you to start your healing journey and develop the skills and knowledge to find yourself again. For many, trauma therapy can feel threatening to the parts of us that protected and shielded us from our pain. This is why you have to learn to accept, nurture, and grow all aspects of the self, in order to heal and feel whole again. My approach to trauma work is a compassionate, mindfulness based approach that is eclectic and utilizes many theories and modalities such as parts work, skill and knowledge development, progressive exposure therapy and narrative therapy.
Intrusive thoughts
Everyone experiences intrusive thoughts and sometimes those thoughts can plague the mind and cause us to become stuck and consumed with fear. Through mindfulness, we can learn to accept our thoughts as not a representation of us and lean to not react to them and break the cycle. Sometimes our thoughts can become obsessive and fixated on a distressing message or idea, feeling like there's never a moment of peace. The reason these thoughts become stuck in our mind is because we find ourselves engaging with them and reacting to them; feeding them.
Attachment wounds
Attachment work is an important part of healing from childhood trauma and learn to have secure and lasting relationships with the important people in our lives. Through therapy you can work to learn to trust others, reinforce your sense of self, and overcome fear of rejection. Through IFS (Internal Family Systems), and attachment theory, I support my clients in addressing and nurturing their attachment wounds by exploring the hidden and suppressed parts of the self that are still wounded and in need of unconditional love.
Insurance
Aetna
In Network
Cigna
In Network
BCBS
Out of Network
Out of Pocket
Sliding Scale
Contact
Start your path today