Claudia Arns Hall

Maybe you have been holding it together at work while quietly coming apart at home. Maybe your teenager has changed in ways you do not understand and you are out of ideas. Maybe you have reached a season where the strategies that carried you this far have simply stopped working. I am Claudia Arns-Hall, a Licensed Professional Counselor in Alabama, and I treat each client as if they were my only client. I came to counseling as a second career. For more than twenty years I worked in human resources, training, and leadership development for organizations including State Street, Revlon, and Southern Company, and I served as a human resources director before making the change. Because I felt a calling in my life to assist others, I earned my M.A. in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from Liberty University, and I also hold an M.S. from Lesley University and a B.S. in Business Administration. For the past four years I have worked at Hill Crest Behavioral Health Services, first as a therapist on the Acute Adult Unit and Patient Intensive Care Unit and now as Clinical Coordinator for the acute unit, where I also train and mentor newer therapists. That is emergency-room-paced behavioral health work, which means very little you bring me will be unfamiliar and none of it will shock me. I have served both adults and adolescents. If you want someone thorough, involved, and genuinely focused on your individual situation rather than on a protocol, that is what I offer.

I approach every client with an open mind, and at the same time I draw on what has actually worked for the people I have sat with before you. Four years in acute behavioral health teaches you a great deal about what helps and what only sounds like it helps. I listen actively, and then I offer concrete direction: real options, real next steps, and honest input about which avenues are worth trying in your particular situation. If you are looking for someone who will only reflect your own words back at you, I am probably not your best fit, because I think I can be more useful than that. A good deal of my work is also educational, helping you understand what is happening to you and why, since most people find their own situation far less frightening once it has a name and a shape. What I want is for you to leave each session feeling seen, heard, and recognized, and also clearer about what comes next. I pour myself into your situation, and I will ask you to meet me in the work, because that is when things actually move.

Our first session is a get-to-know-you. You should walk out of it feeling that you were heard, that your needs were genuinely considered, and that a thoughtful approach is being taken with your specific situation rather than a generic one. We will talk about what brought you in, what has been hardest, and what you would like to be different. I will ask questions, some of them practical, because I want to understand your circumstances and not only your symptoms. There is no requirement that you arrive organized or that you share everything at once. What I want most from that first hour is for you to feel confident that I understand where you are, and to know that you will be counseled in a warm and embracing way. From there we will talk about what the work might look like and where we should start.