Mary Jo Pedersen - LMFT
My Approach
Mary Jo’s expertise is in working with families in overwhelm from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, including traumatic stress from addictions, affairs, and from Domestic Violence and from every day stress. The best way to work with Trauma and Addiction is in a Healing Community. A Marriage and Family Therapist can be one part of this healing community, in addition to doctors and support services, and can offer the following expertise:
IDENTIFY THE TRUE PSYCHOLOGICAL OVERWHELM
- It is very important to identify Destructive Family Dynamics that fuel the overwhelm. There are about 45 Family Destructive Dynamics that Mary Jo can help you and your family identify.
- Once engaged with a Destructive Dynamic, the “Self” becomes “Split”. This is where you think and feel one way and behave in another way. The feeling is that you are divided into two pieces.
- Once the self gets split and the person feels shipped out to sea to die it’s fight, flight or freeze mode.
- At this point your inner child is going wild. This inner “wild” child takes the wheel of your life and becomes very destructive.
THE HEALING
The healing involves the following:
- Identification of the Destructive Dynamics in your family relationships
- Taking good care of you – getting back to internal peace through guided imagery, meditation and breathing – the constructive off ramp to the emotional Tsunami highway.
- Parenting your inner child, EMDR helps your adult self take the wheel of your life so you can more effectively parent your inner child. Mary Jo is EMDR trained.
- Creating constructive dialogue from Honor/Honor, Ask for what you need and make a boundary.
My Vision
My vision is that if we, as families and as a community, begin to identify when we are in a destructive process, understand how our self is being split and divided, identify when we are on the emotional highway of overwhelm and when our inner child is running wild – then we can begin to, take responsibility to get ourselves calmed down and regain some peace. Then our adult self can begin to parent our inner child self. At this point we are ready to have a dialogue about exactly what is bothering us in a constructive way. The skill is honor/honor, ask for what we need and make healthy boundaries. My hope is that these skill sets result in decreased divorces, managed addictions, managed medical issues, and improve parenting.
Biography
Mary Jo Pedersen, M.S., LMFT & Director of Central Coast Counseling Center, has twenty years of counseling experience working with families who are recovering from all kinds of addictions and trauma.
Mary Jo has expertise in working with couples who are “trauma triggered” by Addictive Family Dynamics, and then fly off the handle into divorce, and provides skills and tools as to how to manage all of this emotional overwhelm. Also, she provides a space in her counseling office for a couple to re-think what issues are really going on and how to dialogue about the things that need to be talked about and problem solved rather than go destructive into divorce.