Ran Willman
Senior Clinician
The deeper our faith, the more doubt we must endure; the deeper our hope, the more prone we are to despair; the deeper our love, the more pain its loss will bring: these are a few paradoxes we must hold as human beings. If we refuse to hold them in the hopes of living without doubt, despair, and pain, we also find ourselves living without faith, hope, and love. -Parker J. Palmer
Specialties
Somatic Experiencing, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, Emotionally Focused Therapy, Relational Life Therapy
Consultations
Ran offers free consultations, please contact her to see if you all are a good fit.
Currently, all appointment times are full. Contact Ran if you'd like to join her waitlist.
About Ran
Ran is a Senior Clinician at IPNB Psychotherapy of Austin. If you are looking for someone who is both straight forward and kind, you've found her. Ran brings clarity and grace to her work that helps her people feel safe and held while exploring their own inner clarity. She utilizes parts work, Relational Life Therapy, Emotional Transformation Therapy, and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing in her work and also has a focus on bringing people into compassionate connection with themselves. She works with couples, with those facing grief, and with those working with perinatal complications and infertility struggles.
She views her role as a therapist with humble gratitude for the unique opportunity to bear witness to others’ pain, to help lessen their suffering and to feel less alone in it. Ran is guided by the qualities that are essential to the job such as compassion, sound judgment, and sincere respect for the privilege to sit with clients at their most vulnerable times when they may be facing some of the biggest challenges of their lives.
Ran is someone who is deeply committed to my own journey of personal growth and the work of becoming the best version of herelf, as she progresses through different stages of life. Ran believes in the value growing gentler and wiser as we go through life. Cultivating an interior life has been immeasurably helpful in getting a glimpse of her true nature.
For Ran, as an individual, wife, mother, and therapist, her desire to grow and live with conscious intention, purpose, and meaning motivates how she tries to live her own life, as well as what she tries to bring to her work with her clients.
Q&A with
Ran Willman
How does talking to someone help?
We're born with a fundamental need to connect with others. In the midst of emotional pain and life stressors, if you are willing to turn towards someone trustworthy, healing can unfold.
We can talk about the neuroplastic nature of the brain when in this kind of holding, but what feels more important to me is that bearing witness to your own story and sitting with someone who wants to hear it makes everything unbearable suddenly...bearable. I have tools such as EMDR, ETT, parts work and SE that will come into use at various points in my sessions with people, but these are only tools.
The integration of your brain will come as you sit in enough gentleness and slowness to hear your system's wisdom and let that wisdom guide your healing.
What is your first question for a client, and why?
It's different every time. I don't have a universal question because I am tuning into my resonance with a new person. Each person is so unique, I couldn't imagine just asking one thing.
For me, resonance with my people and supporting them where they are is the most essential task. I often ask about what's most challenging or what brings the most suffering just now and I also ask about what brings them joy. I focus some of my questions on the pain because I want to know what stakes they are facing, what making a decision one way or another might cost them and if there is unresolved grief or trauma. I also focus many of my questions on turning a person's attention inward to find their way out of being stuck.
What is the best thing you have learned from one of your people?
The power of hope. I am recalling a couples case I worked with in which instilling hope and keeping it alive for a couple when they couldn't for themselves was a big part of the work.
As I stand back and look at many people who have crossed my couch, I am noticing how often this happens in my therapy space. If we can have a lived experience of hope, then my clients can take that and find it again on their own. Even if they don't live there just now, holding it together is a path that leads people back to their own original hope. And "hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul, that sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all...." (Emily Dickinson).