Welcome!
New Pattern Counseling - Portland, Oregon
Welcome to New Pattern Counseling! We’re excited to support you on your journey of recovery.
Stepping away from addictive and compulsive behaviors is a tremendous undertaking requiring courage, tenacity, and a solid community.
We believe that recovery goes far beyond merely quitting a drug, or stopping looking at pornography. Sobriety is a way of life, meant to transform and rejuvenate your whole person, how you life, how you work and make decisions. Sobriety is an ongoing endeavor that will redefine who you are.
If this sounds like the journey you want to take, then we are here to help!
What are You Getting Yourself Into?!
Your addiction has a context... So should your recovery
Here at New Pattern Counseling, we work as a team. When you work with us, you’ll have a primary counselor, but it’s very possible you’ll see more than one of us, either individually for talk therapy, in group, for EMDR, or for ongoing recovery coaching.
A best-practice for recovery is to work with you and
1) your partner if you have one, and/or
2) a parent, if you’re a minor, and/or
3) older children, teenagers, or adult children, if they are involved.
A doctor, other counselor, sponsor, pastor, mentor, or other support person can be involved in the process as well, if we together decide that would be helpful.
So then, as you get started on your own journey, plan for us to check in with your partner to ensure that they are also receiving the care they need.*
*We recognize that sometimes, due to safety concerns, this is not possible, and that’s ok.
First Steps
The journey begins with a phone call, or an email, or even a text. Be ready for a brief consultation to talk about scheduling and payment options.
Assessment
For specialized recovery work, we have an in-depth assessment process that covers 2-4 sessions. In this process, we assess your general mental wellbeing, the compulsive behavior problems giving you problems, and get a first glimpse at any underlying traumas.
For sex and porn addiction(compulsive sexual behavior, and problematic pornography use) we use the following specialized assessment measures:
- The Sexual Dependency Inventory and/or The Sexual Digital Media Inventory
- The Post-traumatic Stress Index
- The Money and Work Adaptive Styles Index
Planning
Based on the assessment process, your clinician will provide you an official treatment recommendation. This will outline the level of care we believe you will need in order to make the progress you want.
What’s a Level of Care?
Level of Care talks about how much structure you’ll need in your recovery work in order to achieve and to maintain sobriety. Generally speaking, there are 4 Levels
Outpatient – You meet 2-4 times a month with your individual therapist for 6-12 months.
Intensive Outpatient(IOP) – There are several variations of IOP, but they all involve multiple contacts per week. This could look like individual therapy plus group therapy, or individual therapy plus joining a community based support group, or this could look like working with more than one individual therapist while also participating in a group, or many other variations. We get to be creative.
Inpatient – You step away from your regular life for anywhere between 2 weeks and 6 months to participate in a specialized and highly focused intensive learning experience.
Medically Monitored Inpatient – This level is for individuals with the heaviest patterns of use, who experience physiological dependence, and require not just psychological, but medical care in order to stabilize their recovery.
At New Pattern Counseling, we most commonly provide Outpatient and Intensive Outpatient level of care. If more support is needed, we are able to support you in connecting to the right resources.
Partner Work
Partners of addicted people tend to get overlooked. They also tend to have extraordinarily deep wounds from integrity abuse, being lied to, manipulated and gaslit, being betrayed, being threatened, or even just wanting so much to connect with someone who is emotionally unavailable.
Here at New Pattern Counseling, we offer dedicated partner support, especially for partners working through betrayal trauma. If you, the reader, are the partner, you are more than welcome to reach out and pursue your own healing, regardless of what your addicted partner does or does not do. Please reach out – we really want to hear from you!
The Journey
You’ve reached out, been assessed, been given a treatment recommendation, your partner is involved, everyone is feeling awkward, but progress is still well underway…
…now what?
Quitting is the easy part.
Sobriety is a long term way of life. Because so many things need to be learned, changed, healed, and amended, shifting your life trajectory from super-chaos to thriving-order takes time! Most people take 3-5 years to fully work through all their reasons for being addicted and to set their life on a trajectory of healthy intimacy and general flourishing. That’s not necessarily 5 years of therapy every day; but that does mean we’ll probably be working together in some fashion for a while.
Here's what you can expect during a typical FIRST YEAR of active recovery with New Pattern Counseling -
You’ll work through a series of inner-work projects designed to help you gain insight into yourself and why you do what you do. These may include:
- The Three Circles.
- Mapping out your Acting Out/Acting In cycle
- Personal Chaos Index
- Breaking through Denial
- Examining your road to addiction.
- Figuring out your early warning relapse signals.
- Developing a sobriety plan for normal times.
- Developing an emergency plan for crisis times.
- Looking at your timeline, including a history of sexual development, a history of substance use, and a relationship history.
- Finding your Flow States
- Exploring how you make decisions.
- Learning about the Arousal Template
- Learning about Addiction Interaction and why you might seem to always be doing something too much.
After all this, some folks have found all that they need, and we wish them well as they go on to thrive in their lives.
If you continue with us for a SECOND YEAR, which many people do, then here are some other high points and milestones you might hit -
A focus on personal insight, in both individual and group settings.
Learning and practicing emotional intimacy, attuned attention, secure attachment, and truly being present with another. We primarily practice this in groups, so that you can be better at this when you go home.
Identifying and addressing the underlying factors(aka, Trauma Work). You may complete a Trauma Egg project, do another project on Releasing Dark Passengers, write and reflect on the Legacy Burdens informing your life, and otherwise get to know your story and its players in a deeper way. You’ll be able to claim gems from your heritage while tossing aside the junk. With insight comes agency to make different choices about how you see, respond to, and move about the world.
During the second year, you may Grieve Losses, Processing Grievances and core wounds, and Make Amends.
You’ll continue to Practice Accountability within your group, and hopefully within your own network of friends and supports. All the while you’ll be working to achieve intimacy and trust with close friends in recovery, whileHealing broken trust and achieving intimacy with partner.
As you near the 2 Year mark in your sobriety and healing journey, we hope that this work will allow you to find meaning and community to last your whole life.
and your immediate family have access to all of us.
We are an inter-disciplinary team united in our desire to help you achieve sobriety, and begin to flourish.
Groups, Community, and Relationships
At every stage of recovery, we need community. Both modern neuroscience and ancient wisdom agree - we are wired for connection, and thrive when we struggle together.
Here at New Pattern Counseling, we’re not just about helping you quit your addiction on your own - we are a community of fellow pilgrims on the long journey of healthy sobriety. Our goal is to see you supported by a web of loving and trusting relationships.
We offer the first strand of that web in the form of Groups. As part of your recovery process, you have the opportunity to join at least one of several groups. The other members in your group become your team as you learn to speak about yourself, attend to others, be present with all sorts of stories, and discover a profound sense of worth and belonging.
Join our community by visiting our listing of group offerings. Ask your counselor about the next available opening. We are excited to welcome you into the group!
Have a question? Contact us today
It is important to find a therapist you feel comfortable with. Please contact our office to schedule an initial free consultation to see if if therapy is the right option for you.