Ran Willman, LPC
Ran is one of our senior clinicians. 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, RLT, ETT and EMDR 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.
Specialties
Somatic Experiencing
EMDR
Emotionally Focused Therapy
Relational Life Therapy
Emotional Transformation Therapy
price for services:
$150 per 50 minute session
Sliding scale available? Yes
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 of the 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
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Q&A with Ran
How does talking to someone help?
We are all 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 that 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).