HELEN FREILING:
GUIDING GROWTH THROUGH IMPERFECTION
Lou Andreas Salome on Rilke
Should we not be moved rather than chilled by the knowledge that he might have attained his greatness only through his frailties?
My Story
I grew up amidst the forests of the Pacific Northwest, where I first discovered the art of diagnostic psychology. I completed my Bachelor’s in Psychology with a Thesis on forgiveness and reconciliation in interpersonal betrayal. During my undergraduate studies, I interned at Trinity Hospital, leading both inpatient and outpatient groups, which deepened my interest in diagnosis and treatment planning.
I continued my journey in Washington, D.C., at The Institute for the Psychological Sciences, where I researched attachment theory and completed my practicum in southern Maryland. I specialized in integrating treatment modalities, focusing on trauma and EMDR under a certified traumatologist. After becoming a Licensed Professional Counselor, I worked across various levels of care for eating disorders, trained in Unified Treatment, Exposure Response Prevention, DBT, and process-oriented group therapy.
My career took me to Romania in 2022, where I integrated EMDR, conflict resolution, and psychological first aid into my work with refugees and local populations. I provided lectures, collaborated with psychiatric institutions, and trained charity staff. Now, as I finish my certification through the Green Cross, I focus on Complex Trauma and incorporating spirituality in the healing of childhood sexual abuse, and I'm interested in using Internal Family Systems to further work on mending amnestic fissures in the brain and psyche allowing a person to integrate more fully in the process of healing. I find great joy in witnessing the determination and hope of my patients in my private practice.
My Approach
My conceptualization of the person sitting across from me is a wholistic one – a person is wholly physical, psychological, social and spiritual. I work from a strengths-based and virtues psychology perspective that entails that, instead of simply seeing what is wrong with you or in your life, we look at what your natural gifts, talents and desires are that will allow you to move through survival and into flourishing.
Donald Kalsched, in Trauma and the Soul, suggests that trauma often begins as a mythological story before becoming personal. These wounds, left from our struggles, can be where healing enters, as Leonard Cohen noted, "There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in."
I help individuals move towards integrating their fragmented stories and finding meaning in their endeavors. Rainer Maria Rilke captures this in poetry, describing the reconciliation of life’s mismatched threads and the deeper connection it fosters::
“She who reconciles the ill-matched threads of her life, and weaves them gratefully into a single cloth — it’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall and clears it for a different celebration where the one guest is you. In the softness of evening it’s you she receives. You are the partner of her loneliness, the unspeaking center of her monologues. With each disclosure you encompass more and she stretches beyond what limits her, to hold you.”
CREDENTIALS & CERTIFICATIONS
MS: Master in Clinical Psychology
LCPC: Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor (MD)
LPC: Licensed Professional Counselor (VA)
EMDR: Eye movement Desensitization and Reprocessing practitioner (level II of II)
GCAT: Member of the Green Cross Academy
CTRS: Certified Master Traumatologist with the Green Cross Academy
Working Together
Have you ever wondered what a “real” experience of therapy would be like? The process you will encounter as we move through the stages of psychotherapy is guided by my confidence in the interpersonal relationship, that is the rapport between you and I.
When the effectiveness of individual therapy has been studied throughout the last century, time and again the relationship between the therapist and the patient rises to the top as the number one “curative factor”. Meaning, whatever other skills and methodologies I employ and offer, in allowing yourself and your inner world to become known by myself, matched with my capacity and reciprocity for that experience of becoming known, we will allow what needs to come to light to surface.
In our work together, you will allow me to see the narrative of your life from your own eyes and endeavor to trust that new ways of relating to yourself, the world, your memories and ultimately to ‘the other’ can be renewed through our practice. With mindful attentiveness and by gently confronting obstacles and threats to interior freedom in a collaborative manner, the patients I work with are able to experience an increase in personal resilience simultaneous to undergoing the process of cathartic healing. My use of techniques drawn from an array of professional proclivities and seeped in the Interpersonal Psychotherapy model creates a safe relationship that nourishes innate strengths