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Wellspring Counseling, LLC

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Wellspring Counseling, LLC

Professional counseling services for anxiety, depression, OCD, PTSD, relationship problems, and more.

12/03/2025

Gifted. This season is full of it: performances, sacred services, gift exchanges, food giveaways, card sharing, and donations. Each of these involve the act of giving and receiving. These are acts of catch and release,infused with the warmth of unconditional regard.
Giving and receiving can feel like complicated exchanges. It can feel perfunctory, obligatory or rote. It can feel like there are expectations packed inside the response anticipated from us. Sometimes we rally to show up for the moment, engage with the activity to meet the social demands of the encounter, while a large part of ourselves feels empty or despondent inside.
“Christmastime is here. Happiness and cheer. O that we could always have such spirit through the year.” Famous lines from the Charlie Brown soundtrack. But it highlights something very important. It isn’t always happiness and cheer that we are feeling. There is contrast. There is heartache. These are very real for many even in spite of an amplitude of “Holly and Jolly.”
Go bravely into the season with a sensitivity to your own feelings and an allowance for that to waiver and fluctuate and temper those expectations arriving this time of year with permission to feel-

11/18/2025

Ritual. A ritual is defined as “a repeated, structured sequence of actions or behaviors that alter the internal or external state of the individual “ (Wikipedia). We are custodians of plenty of ritual in the next 6 weeks of the calendar year. These gatherings, these traditions, these gestures of food and activity are all deeply carved grooves in our lives. These gatherings themselves generate “altered internal or external states,” but also so the anticipation of the gathering as well.
In “Bouncing Back,” psychotherapist and neuroscience expert Linda Graham states that our “sense of connection affects our ability to regulate our internal states during crisis and stress” (Weller). Perhaps this is what makes these end of the year rituals so tricky. They may promise connection and they may deliver on connection, but for some people they reveal disconnection, friction and buried conflicts that make the anticipation of the event or even the event(s) themselves complicated and layered.
The companion to ritual is rest. Rest is an active state of laying down and ceasing to strive. It is the resolution of control. If you are white-knuckled going into the holiday season, consider carving out equal parts rest with ritual. Make margins inside your gatherings for self-care and pause.

11/03/2025

Messy Middle. I was recently talking with a runner who had just completed her first Marathon. She made an observation about marathon running that captured my imagination. She said, “The middle part, say 10 miles of it, is where it can break down. That is where the work is. A mental strategy is needed to stay focused.” Boredom. Fatigue. Loneliness. Doubt- these were the things needling her. And exit ramps abound. There are ways to abbreviate your goals, settle for less and end the race early. She was able to keep at it because of a phrase she had picked up in her training, “Stay in your mile.”
In a flash I was drawn back to Bruce Feiler’s work, “Life is in the Transitions.” He acknowledged that the greatest work of transitions is what is called, “The Messy Middle.” It can endure for multiple years and bears out the greatest effort in going from one puncture point of charge to fully entering another. And again in Heidi Priebe’s book, “This Is Me Letting You Go,” she writes “We have to be patient with ourselves as we move through the parts in between where we’ve been and where we are going. We have to let the chasm motivate, not dishearten us. It is okay to not be there yet.”
How easy it is to mis-interpret all those bumpy phases of change as defeat or dismissal or the abbreviation of what we are focused on achieving. And how tempting it is to choose an exit ramp inside the mess of change that takes us right back to what we were leaving or what we haven’t fully learned. Inside the change is a long stretch of mess and pavement. Inside that turbulence and boredom and fatigue, we’ve got to “Stay in our mile.” One foot in front of the other while we continue to believe in the goal of change and the outcome of it. Trusting the process and leaning into the time it takes to get there.

10/16/2025

Wind. It is invisible until it pushes against something. Or plays on water. Or lifts anything loose on its path. No one would dare suggest it is not powerful. And yet wind is lacking in identity without resistance.
Recently I have been re-reading Thomas Moore’s book, “Care of the Soul.” He wrote, “We have come to know the soul only in its complaints; when it stirs, disturbed by neglect and abuse, and causes us to feel its pain. . .We can’t just think ourselves through it, because thinking itself is part of the problem. What we need is a way out of dualistic attitudes. We need a third possibility. . .”
Much like the wind, our essence, our core self is exposed inside the struggles that surface, the conflict we find ourselves in, the places where we feel pain. The symptoms we experience like melancholy and disinterest, they point to what has been unattended to, what is long overdue for attention and discovery. We are creatures of meaning.
Inside these early weeks of Fall, listen for the wind. Be gently reminded of what may need re-membering inside you-

09/21/2025

The Growing Season. Def: A period of time where the conditions are favorable to support life. Here in North America, agriculture is beginning to close its growing season. The harvesters are in the fields bringing in the corn and the garden plots are struggling to bring the final tomatoes to ripening. Cooler evenings remind us that fall is on its way.
But where are you? Are you inside a growing season undefined by hours of sunlight or daytime humidity? Are you meeting a challenge with a new strategy and a new understanding of what was missing before? Are you expanding your heart? Or, if you were honest, has it felt more like a period of dormancy and winter? Has the challenge in front of you been met with a stiffening or a rigidity? Do you feel stuck?
The invitation is very real and present. Nature is on full display of what can come at the end of a growing season-

09/04/2025

Savor. September affords us endless opportunities to practice savor. And our five senses: Sight, Sound, Smell, Taste and Touch can lead the way. I recently read Gretchen Rubin’s book, “Life in Five Senses” and it captured her quest to live each day drenched in what her senses could magnify and bring into focus. As she traveled each day with greater sensitivity to what her five senses could observe or collect, she discovered a different kind of vitality or richness to her days.
The five senses have also been identified as a means to bring us back to the present moment and help us zoom in on just where we are when our minds want to travel either back to the past or much forward into an uncertain future. Stopping right where you are, right now and collecting 5 Sights, 4 Sounds, 3 Smells, 2 Tastes and 1 Touch can bring you back to center and help abbreviate an anxious moment.
I challenge you to engage this wonderful capacity we have to take in the world around us and be comforted by it.

08/24/2025

Do you find yourself in the gaps? Inside of every transitional moment is a gap. It is that space between what was and what may be or what is on the way. It is a threshold of sorts, a gateway but it can be of indeterminate length. I can hear it in the questions that fill the room in session, “Should I stay in this relationship? Should I take this job? Should I look deeper or harder or more critically at this memory, or this experience or this feeling I have?” These are beautiful places of discovery and exploration but they are also exhausting places of wait and uncertainty.
What used to be predictable even if it was painful now looks different or feels different in disorienting ways. These intermediate places inside big changes can be the hardest part of the change itself. We stand inside the gaps waiting on the fullness of the change we are seeking-

08/06/2025

August brings the maturity of tomatoes hanging heavy on the vine. Their round, fat, juicy goodness has been building since early May and in many ways in those long winter days many moons before, where the seed was just giving way to a plant. All the possibility of that tomato emerging at summer’s end was present inside that fledgling seed. It lacked nothing. The environment did the rest- providing soil, water and sunlight to engage all the components that were already vetted inside that tiny cartilage of a seed.
We forget that we are made this way too. Resilience is built in. Capacity is built in too. The bandwidth to think with different eyes or try new experiences- also built in. We lack nothing. It just takes a fair amount of engagement to draw these things together and draw them out of us- to grow. And remember, as a wise person once said, “The day you plant the seed, is not the day you eat the fruit.” The landscape of the heart is a ready garden.

07/21/2025

The butterfly effect is a scientific concept developed by Edward Lorenz. He studied weather data and determined that a small condition change can produce a significant change in weather outcomes. This concept became known as “The Butterfly Effect” suggesting that something as small as a butterfly’s wings flapping could reshape weather patterns.
In a couple weeks, we will begin to see Monarch butterflies here in Central Illinois passing through on their 3,000 mile migration to Mexico. Their tiny and delicate stature makes such a feat seemingly impossible. It takes 3 generations of butterflies to make that passage but even still, it is astounding.
As you come across them, on a walk to work or being outside exercising or gathering with friends, be reminded that something that small can alter weather systems. We don’t have to move mountains in our lives to see change. We can make tiny improvements that guide us into new territories of course altering outcomes.

07/07/2025

Freedom- it has become an anecdotal word in our North American culture. But it is made of bedrock. What is it after all? In psychological terms it is the ability to pivot, to choose change, to alter one’s position. It is not forged in times that are vacant of adversity or trial, rather it is proven in them. Freedom is the choice in the response. It is movement within a particularly hard process. It is the very active element inside the elasticity that we talk about in therapy. Freedom to change.
Life experiences including trauma and shame can lead to places of calcification. These are places where our responses seem frozen or fixed. Perhaps they feel inside an endless loop of disappointment, distance and retreat. Freedom comes knocking and offers a new perspective. Response to adversity can take a different shape; it can be altered, healed, reconstructed. Freedom to develop new patterns of thought and behavior. Freedom to try again. . .over and over again, like growing a new muscle.
Where are you today? Do you want to learn more about how freedom opens places in your life that have felt closed and shut down? Reach out today and begin that journey-

06/24/2025

We are all at mid-year. Good time to check in on your peace. How are you doing? Are you at peace with yourself? Etty Hillesum, a Dutch survivor of a concentration camp in 1943, is quoted as saying, “Ultimately we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace within ourselves.” How is that going? And have you begun the permission process in that claim? Seems like most of us try to get there from the outside in. We try to order and re-order outside circumstances hoping that will deliver the peace we crave. . . But Etty invites us to think differently. She asks us to restore our peace within ourselves.
How? I believe some of the how is inside Mahatma Gandhi’s reflection: “Peace is not the absence of conflict but the ability to cope with it.” Part of restoring peace within ourselves is about distress tolerance; it is about returning to a state of elasticity- where we bounce back from stressful events and circumstances and come back to a place of center or calm. Permission comes in the form of recognizing that we first have a relationship with ourselves prior to and previous to any other relationship we are engaged in. Go there first and then discover that the peace you carry is contagious.

06/04/2025

“There is no place so awake and alive as the edge of becoming.” Sue Monk Kidd
I am often asked in session, “How do I heal?” And the answer is a challenging one; it involves being open. The challenge of being “fully alive” as Sue said is about accepting that both good things and devastatingly difficult things will come our way.
Brene’ Brown in her book, “Atlas of the Heart,” wrote, “It takes alot of courage to show up and be all in when we cannot control the outcome.” This is where healing has its way- in acceptance that we never controlled the outcome anyway. But we can control how we respond to it.

Address

2534 Farragut Drive, Suite #2
Springfield, IL
62704

Opening Hours

Monday	8am - 5pm
Tuesday	8am - 7pm
Wednesday	8am - 7pm
Thursday	8am - 7pm
Friday	10am - 2pm

Telephone

+12179534660

Website

http://www.wellspringcounseling-springfield.com/

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