Jessica Marsteller

Jessica is a Clinical Mental Health Counseling student at Northern Arizona University, pursuing her Master’s degree.

 
As a child the mental health field called to me, and I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to offer wellness and healing to the members of my community. Helping to make a difference for the people in my area was my mission, even from a tender age. For a time, I didn’t know exactly how to achieve my self-appointed goal. As I grew older living in a rural Arizona town, I began to notice things. There were aging veterans who felt forgotten by their community, and many families facing the issues that come with poverty. It was the effects of substance use on the community that shone a light on how problematic the struggles of life can become if coupled with our minds. On the flip side, I saw how resilient our minds truly can be; when explored and understood they can blossom and thrive. Once I realized that a safe mind can be achieved I understood that my place was to aid in re-connection to a calmer, clearer mind.

 
Throughout our lives, we all can use support in mental health during different chapters of our story. Life can become heavy, and support in the age of technology can wear thin. My goal is to work with your strengths and collaborate with them in a flexible, tailored approach to therapy. I aim to help you gain or reclaim any helpful knowledge or skills, as well as provide the support needed to become more comfortable within yourself. As a counselor it is important to me that you feel secure and supported, feeling prepared when you are faced with challenges in life. I work from a person-centered, self-compassion-based standing with many theories such as ACT, CBT, DBT, mindfulness, and somatic therapeutic techniques to best assist with techniques that will suit you as a client in your journey. I will work with you to reconnect with yourself and your intuition, presence, and tools to best handle the stressors and challenges that you will face along your story.

 
I enjoy bringing deeper aspects of the client into the room with us during sessions. Using them as an invaluable tool to gain important insight to guide the treatments and techniques used that are already accessible or comfortable within your life. Therapy can offer new insights and information but can also incorporate many aspects of your multidimensional lifestyle right into the sessions. Using traditions, cultural healing, faith, social ideals, and identities within the sessions brings more of the person into the session, while also taking the healing opportunities outside of the sessions. In doing this, the aim is to give you room to think of solutions or coping techniques that you as a client can use in specific situations and in your individual life.

 
Whether we are working together on anxiety, grief, depression, or any number of different, more specific problems or goals, I will aim to support and cultivate a stronger sense of one’s self. While helping to guide you to a more stable, more comfortable state of mind. As a developing counselor, each client brings valuable insight into the counseling experience that helps both of us counselor and client to develop our skill set. Likewise, I will use experience gained, and growth as a whole to continue my state of learning and helping. I look forward to a long career and am so grateful to be able to work with clients and continue to share knowledge and dive deep into each person’s inner world while working together.