George Hage, Ed. D., Ph. D., LCMHCS

I offer spiritual counseling empowering the client with his or her natural endowment of creativity. In every trial, the client increases awareness as to his or her control over the personality. Likened to a work of art, the client sees self as the artist who is shaping and reshaping his or her portrait. From a spiritual vantagepoint, he or she raises awareness as to the power of will and choice. Hence, the mind and heart need not choose to believe in every thought and emotion that passes through them. Harmful opinions, beliefs, and judgements in reality due not need to be empowered by acceptance and belief. Rather they be discarded by choice or, at least reframed, in order to restore or recreate the health and wholeness of the personality.

Having practiced counseling for 33 years, I have concluded that the human being who is essentially a living soul and spirit must be treated as such. He or she is a living personality that although flawed from the primeval fall is pliable and may be shaped and reshaped according to the will, mind, and heart of the person. This is the gift of creativity which places the human soul in the image of God, as the first thing that God did was to create the heavens and the earth from the abysmal darkness of the nothing or no-thing.

Thus, when you contact and meet with me, I apply total genuine positive regard. I welcome you, show respect, and make you feel at home to the best of my ability. You are of very high value, and I do all I can to work with you despite financial, work, or scheduling hardships. This is why my prices are low. I also am flexible with you from the payment standpoint.

In treating mental health and/or addiction disorders, I apply the following therapies that are also reflective of time-tested spiritual principles. These occur in the Bible, the different Christian Traditions, Judaism, Buddhism, and other world spiritual and religious traditions. Some of these are Solution Focused Therapy, Person Centered Therapy, Cognitive Behavior Therapy, Mindfulness Therapy, Logo Therapy, Forgiveness and Reconciliation Therapies, and theories of Self-Actualization, Self-Realization, Self-Mastery, Enlightenment, and Transformation/Transfiguration.

I have concluded that many if all our mental health and addiction issues occur not merely due to our genetic predisposition toward them, but due to the way we think and feel about our trials and challenges. Often egos are shaped around our past experiences whether good or bad. Also, egos need not be narcissistic or egoic. In turn, we create stories about these memories to which we give our identity. Resultantly, we experience clusters of issues centered around depression stemming from the past and anxiety due to bad experiences in the past being projected into the future as uncertain assumptions.

Hence, I approach counseling in terms of guiding you into developing presence and awareness. You learn to be the watcher of your thoughts and feelings, and then you realize these as powerless due to your aware detachment from them. Thereupon, you become empowered with the freedom of choice to manage, shape, and reshape your personality and, therefore, your life. This is what I mean by becoming the artist of your personality or the master of self.

You may learn more about my approaches online via Psychology Today, Good Therapy, Therapy Tribe, Open Path Collective, and Google Business. These will also give you further insights into my philosophy and theories of counseling.

I demonstrate 11 years of successful experience at Insight Human Services in Winston-Salem, NC and 5000 clincially supervised hours under the NC Substance Abuse Practicing Board toward the Certified Substance Abuse Counseling credential. I am high skilled in dual diagnostic assessing and treating.

I have worked with youth and adults with this disorder over the tenure of my counseling career of 32 years. With many of these clients ADHD is tied into Anxiety. ADHD requires parental intervention any facilitating the treatment of children and young adolescents. Older adolescents and adults, it requires the decision on their parts to develop skills of thought, emotional, and overall self-management.

Anger or rage according to Eckhart Tolle stems from what he postulates as the pain body in a human being. This metaphor depicts the extreme extent of one’s pain from the past impacting upon current pain, therefore, enhancing the painfulness of pain. People with such an issue wrap their identity around stories, memories, and beliefs regarding their misfortunes. Hence, they hold grudges and find themselves unforgiving, irritable, unhappy, untrusting, and often disassociated. If they seek a relationship, that is only to soothe the deep pain that they bear. When that relationship ceases to do this for their ego, anger and rage are again aroused in them. Thus the relationship is threatened, and if it does not terminate, it can lead to violence and verbal intrigue of the angered toward the other. Counseling can sooth and alleviate anger, by empowering the willing angered soul toward mindful awareness of the machinations of his ego and pain body moving the mind and ego.
Over the tenure of my counseling career of 32 years, I have come to see that anxiety arises from a thought disorder that projects assumptions into the future of pain and ill from the past. Because the person lives in the pain and fear of the past, he or she has no confidence that things will go well in the future. So that person frets about what he projects may happen. He or she overthinks this.
Bipolar Disorder is the recent designation given to the condition of manic depression in contrast with unipolar depression. The mania of the Bipolar Disorder condition is based upon anxiety, which, in reality, is on the x end of the y end a linear continuum. If x is depression than y is anxiety or vice versa, the assumption is that there is no unipolar depression apart from a modicum of anxiety or vice versa. Both play together. However, if the depressed person increases in the development of anxiety to equal that of depression or vice versa, then mood swings may set in. In turn, these mood swings can grow worse leaving clients not only suffering a major depressive disorder, but via a sudden upswing, they may feel some relief, yet suddenly find themselves in the mania of anxiety. For some, this may be a euphoric delusionary experience or may even result in extreme anger and rage with delusions. If in rage, the afflicted soul, releases anger verbally and/or physically against another person that is seen as the shadow of a past person who may have brought past trauma or grief to themselves. At times with some, mania may be accompanied with substance or drug use and often provoked or enhanced by the same. Counseling empowers afflicted clients with awareness as to thought and feeling processes moving them as a pendulum between x and y. Mindful counseling leads them to the ability to manage these thoughts and feelings by learning the power of centering in the present now. Practicing such presence ultimately frees them from the impact of thoughts and feelings of a troubled pass impacting their present and even their future with illusory projections of harm and defeat.
Relationship and marriage grow out of the natural attraction of two persons for one another. The draw between the couple is a natural presence of both for one another. This strong appeal occurs often not merely due to sexual attraction but the initial occurrence of love from the being of both souls filling that space between them. In moments of time, thoughts, opinions, judgements, and beliefs are suspended with the egos of both for one another. During these moments of togetherness exists no time, worry, or cares. Instead exists only the enjoyment of seeing, touching, listening, and even tasting one another. This is the power of the present now that generates the relationship, often inspiring it to commitment and even marriage. Woefully, many relationships fail, because the moments of true love were overtaken by the egos seeking self-satisfaction and gratification at the expense of one another. The ego’s lack due to the consuming drive of painful loss in the past no longer feels satisfied by the relationship. Hence this lack from one or both parties brings detriment to the relationship. Counseling, in turn, can facilitate the restoration of presence between the couple while giving them the means of maintaining presence and with that strengthening their relationship.
A better concept for the label self-esteem is the self-concept. This latter idea empowers the client who is bearing the label to realize the power of the self over this disorder. In essence, counseling guides the client to see that the self may choose the images of self that he or she wishes to bear. The poor self-image is believed by the mind to be the true person due to the mind's laying hold on pain and abuse from the past. The mind chooses to see this as the person's reality and state of being. But counseling leads this person into seeing the insubstantiality of such belief by empowering the self to be the watcher of such thoughts and feelings. Thence, the watcher sees the power to glimpse into his or her being and see that he or she is endowed with creative power and virtue. This is the true self.
Thinking Disorders give impetus to many of our mental health and addiction disorders. Thinking lies at the base of our feelings about ourselves and our reality of the world around us. Thinking in a harmful sense has gone awry in the United States. The resultant ego defines a false self that fosters much anxiety and depression as well as harmful viewpoints regarding the self concept and concept of others and creation. Being unable to dissacociate from harmful experiences and memoreies of the past is due to our continually thinking about it. From thence comes depression. The same is said of the future. Due to past experiences we project harmful and defeatest thoughts into the future. From thence comes anxiety. In time, as we continue to believe these thoughts, they gradually lead us into unnecessary sadness, mood swings, anger, jealously, adictions, copedependence and the like. Also, they facilitate many physical ills and diseases. Counseling guides us into thought and feeling management called mindfulness. It teaches us to become free of unnecessary, harmful thoughts and feelings. This happens when we learn to be cenetered on the now or present, a state that is natural to the human soul.

Overall we apply CBT with mindfulness and logo therapy emphasizing healing through life's trials.