We speak With Rebecca Lucas about counseling, what types of counseling her group provides and what EMDR is, how to talk with someone if we feel they need counseling and how a person should approach counseling if they think they need it.

Link to Christian Counseling Services- https://christiancounselingservicesaz.com/

Things Rebecca Recommends in our talk:

-Dr. Kristin Neff-Compassion Researcher, Author and Teacher

Brenae Brown-The Power of Vulnerability

Speaker 0 00:03 Welcome to the Southwest life podcast with your host, me, Vicki DeLuzio, where we will talk about things to boost your health, improve your relationships, find new things to do with your family, and talk with business owners in the area. And more. Thanks for being here and enjoy the show. Speaker 1 00:27 Thank you, Rebecca, for joining us with Christian counseling services. Uh, today on our program we would like to just chat with you about, um, what you do with Christian counseling surfaces. Um, but can you first tell us a little bit about yourself and your family? Yeah, absolutely. Speaker 2 00:45 I am, I’m a mom of two girls. Uh, I live in surprise in the West Valley. Uh, we’ve lived here for about 10 years. Um, we have community connections. We’ve been to churches out here. We homeschooled out here for a lot of years. Um, I am, uh, you know, just really, really excited to, you know, for Christian counseling services to have opened an office here in surprise. Um, and I, I don’t know, I was just really passionate about it. And where did Christian counseling services start? So Christian counseling services was founded by Jenn Cecil. Uh, Jen is a counselor. She counseled out in the community for a lot of years. Uh, she’s got a lot of wisdom, a lot of experience, and she really, really, um, had a passion for, um, you know, counseling in the church. Uh, for a long, long time. There seems to have been a stigma about mental health services in the church. Speaker 2 01:51 Um, and so what she really, really wanted to do was she wanted to find a way to integrate that professional help with faith-based principles because, um, a lot of people in the community weren’t comfortable going to counselors that weren’t familiar with their belief system, uh, who might suggest things that they weren’t comfortable with or, uh, who were, uh, you know, a little too secular. And so she founded the company and I was just her for a long, long time. And then she decided to bring on more people because she ended up turning a lot of people away. She would get full and she just couldn’t take on more clients. And so she took on a first one person and then two people. And three people. And now we’ve grown. I mean I think I lose track cause we’re adding new people all the time and I think we’re over 20 now and she’s got offices all over the Valley. Speaker 2 02:34 Um, and so we just, I don’t know. Our niche, our specialty or focus is providing faith-based services, you know, the integrate with Christian beliefs. Well, um, from a roots focused trauma informed perspective and we’re all trained in EMDR, which is a really neat kind of treatment. Uh, that works really well for a lot of people. And that’s, you know, that’s just kind of what we do. Oh. So, um, why did you want to get into counseling? That’s a great question. I can’t remember ever wanting to do anything else from the time I was in middle school. Okay. I’m going to start it out. I was like, Oh, I want to be a marriage and family therapist. And then it was like, Oh, I want to be a counseling psychologist. And then finally, you know, I landed when it was time to make a career choice, I landed with the professional counselor, um, degree program. Speaker 2 03:26 Cause that seemed to have kind of the widest application in terms of working with general mental heal