Heather Miller

You know something needs to change. You may even know what. What you cannot figure out is how to get from here to there, and you are tired of white-knuckling it in the meantime. I'm Heather Miller, a Licensed Professional Counselor in Missouri, and I have been in the counseling field for twenty-five years. I started as a school-based counselor and opened my private practice in 2013. Before any of that I trained as a nurse, which still shapes how I think about this work: your mind and your body are not separate systems, and what is happening in one usually shows up in the other. I hold a Master of Education with training in both professional counseling and school counseling, so I am equally at home with adults and with adolescents, including parents trying to help a kid the school system has not figured out yet. My goal has not changed in all that time. I want to empower you to overcome the obstacles in front of you and build a life that feels happier and more meaningful. I see clients throughout Missouri by telehealth, so you can do this from home on a computer, tablet, or phone.

I work with clinically tested, evidence-based interventions, and the two I rely on most are Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Solution-Focused Brief Therapy. In plain terms, that means we spend our time on what is actually keeping you stuck and on what will move it. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is the work of noticing the thoughts running underneath your reactions, testing whether they are true, and building better ones. Solution-Focused Brief Therapy comes at it from another angle: rather than cataloguing everything that is wrong, we look for the times things went right, even briefly, and work out what was different then. Both are practical and both are goal-directed, which means you should be able to tell whether therapy is working. I am also not going to keep you in therapy longer than you need me. My nursing background means I pay attention to the physical side as well, your sleep, your health, the medications you are on, because those are rarely irrelevant to how you feel. And I will be direct with you. If I think something is getting in your way, I will say so, kindly and plainly.

The first session is mostly me getting to know you and understanding what brought you here now. We will talk about what has been hardest, what you have already tried, what helped and what did not, and what you would like to be different. Because I work in a goal-directed way, we will also begin shaping what you actually want out of this, though you do not need to arrive with that figured out. Most people do not, and getting clear on it is often the first genuinely useful thing we do together. I will ask about the practical side too: how you are sleeping, how you are eating, your health, who is around you. Nothing gets pushed. You share what you are ready to share. Before we finish I will tell you honestly what I am thinking, what I would suggest we work on, and roughly what that might look like, so you leave with a plan rather than just another appointment.