Pictured left to right: Chase Wickersham, LCSW, Dr. Steven C. Hayes, Ph.D., and Esther Wickersham – Chase’s wife. You can see us touching elbows – this was due to the preliminary caution recommended just weeks before the initial severity and peak of the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. This was during training for Acceptance and Commitment Therapy in SLC, UT, 2020. It is one of my favorite photographs. 🙂
About me.
My name is Chase Wickersham, welcome to Kaizen Center for Mental Health (KCMH) and more about what we believe is important about helping those we serve. You may be considering beginning therapy, interested in employment, or looking for training or coaching. I hope you find something useful in my own and our team’s message along your journey.
I am a Licensed Clinical Social Worker in the state of Utah and attended graduate school at the University of Utah. I work as a mental health therapist with addiction, depression, and anxiety issues. I enjoy leading our clinical mental health team, along with operating KCMH as the owner.
I provide remote and in person training for types of therapy called Motivational Interviewing, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), and Mind-Body Bridging (MBB) – among others. I have created pieces of training lasting from around an hour to multiple days in varied mental health agency settings. I love animals, yoga, cycling, photography, the outdoors, spending time with people I love, and gardening.
What matters to KCMH as professionals helping you.
The core values we have at KCMH that guide our services are authenticity, balance, safety, learning, and openness. Counseling provides opportunities for those suffering to experience new learning of skills for handling life-disrupting, ongoing pain. Especially important is learning to apply these new, sometimes awkward feeling life-enriching patterns when we are tempted to drop back into the same old struggle with pain.
Clients can benefit greatly from an environment where safe to engage in this often scary and confusing process of discovery with mental health problems. Done wisely, counseling and training can facilitate learning how to deeply heal from what has wounded us, and what may still be hurting us.
Dr. Steven C. Hayes suggests “we hurt where we care and care where we hurt”. Paradoxically, pain is often deeply connected to the values of the heart. Re-connecting or discovering our own values – qualities of being and doing – is an ongoing process of implementing larger and larger values-based patterns through trial and error. With help, we can pivot into these meaningful directions and life can change dramatically.
We are not broken, often we lack awareness or willingness to care for our own needs more wisely.
This absence of skill with handling our own mind’s domination in unhelpful thinking, predicting, planning, and ruminating can often lead to unavoidable, endless misery. It is my perspective through learning about Relational Frame Theory (RFT) that this quality of the human mind is responsible for us being the only species that willingly end our own lives prematurely.
Paradoxically, the same is true for us being the only species with a mind that is capable of forming endless new connections, prompting inventions allowing us to invent life prolonging medicine or technology.
Taking time to learn how to show up to our own problematic thoughts and painful experiences with new confidence in our skills, we can reduce the impact and influence of those same painful happenings that trigger avoidance behavior. This includes the overuse of food, work, drugs, alcohol, and staring at our phones during important times in life.
Healing and thriving are possible with practice and feedback.
A lesson we’ve learned helping others heal is the universal possibility to practice drawing strength and wisdom from painful experiences in our lives. Happenings so painful that before help they appeared 100% pain, 0% wisdom – therefore to be avoided, useless. No matter the kind of suffering, we hope to connect you to the wisdom of pain, to a life you look forward to and can look back upon with more gratitude.
Pain visits us all, asking us to summon willingness to learn, adapt, and engage untapped resources and perspectives. This process of change often happens amongst unwanted, ongoing waves of pain.
You can’t stop the wave, but you can learn to surf.
— Jon Kabat-Zinn
Rather than struggle endlessly, we can learn to adapt and surf the distressing waves of inevitable pain and live with more vitality in this one life we are given.
I’ve watched this surfing happen in my own life and those of my clients with practice and support through setbacks. Our staff works closely with each other in meetings every other week for group clinical meetings, and regular individual, ongoing training. I often feel reinvigorated after working with clients or hearing from staff about what is truly helping clients. Working with professionals who care about sharpening skills, engaging in real self-care, and providing competent, compassionate service is truly a rewarding experience for me and our team.
Please reach out if you could use support, we can help.
To learn more:
At this time I am not accepting new clients, if you are still interested in seeking counseling, you can click the link below to either be added to a waitlist or see another one of our counselors I work with and trust at KCMH. If you are interested in receiving training from me or one of my team, please email info@kaizencenter.org. Thank you for reading, I hope my sharing invites something useful to your journey.
Chase
