Who we are and what we do: Gatewell Therapy Center is a multidisciplinary practice that focuses on healing minds and bodies. We offer individual, couples, family, and group therapy; along with nutritional assessment, counseling, and meal support. As our tagline states, we are committed to helping you cultivate authenticity, resilience, and hope.
In addition to our general practice, focusing on anxiety and mood disorders, emotional emotional dysregulation, and relationship concerns, we specialize in the areas of eating disorders, substance use disorders, and trauma. In working with all of these concerns, we seek to help you find freedom from the oppressive forces that result in your suffering. Respect, acceptance, and liberation of you and your body is paramount.
Widening the lens: While we honor our unique disciplinary ethical codes, we have made additional ethical commitments toward supporting you and the members of our community. Our “Do NoHarm” ethical guideline goes beyond aspirational for us. We are deeply invested in offering healing rather than harm. For instance, we believe in weight-inclusive vs. weight-centric approaches. We also believe in examining and challenging the systems that impact individual functioning. We don’t see therapy as “fixing” someone in a vacuum. Everyone exists in context, historical and current, and we can’t heal on our own. In fact, we see many of the symptoms that folks bring to us as adaptations to harmful systems. Healing requires connection, awareness, and some degree of externalization.
In other words, we believe that whatever brought you here – your pain, your symptoms, your concerns – reside in you but are likely reflective of a culture, community, and systems that impact us all. We see ourselves as collaborators in your healing, supporters of your authentic selves, locators of your resilience, upholders of your hope, and advocates for structural change outside of you.
We are committed, given our ethics and our privileges, to identifying, challenging, and advocating against systems and structures that marginalize, oppress, and keep people stuck. We accomplish this by using our voices, our influence as professionals, and our financial resources.
A non-shaming environment: We intend to be non-judgmental, non-shaming, and respectful of you and your experiences. We are more interested in understanding your behavior than criticizing it, judging it, or shaming it. We find that people are generally doing the best they can in the situations they face and that working toward changing ourselves requires acceptance, understanding, and a non-shaming environment. We aspire to resource and empower you to make the changes you want.
Our privileges and commitment to learning: As providers, we are educationally privileged, but we believe that you are the expert on your experience. We know we can learn from you just as much as you can learn from us. We honor the symbiotic nature of this experience. If we don’t know something, we’ll acknowledge that. We are committed to learning and doing better. It is important to note here that in addition to our education, we occupy other positions of privilege, including size privilege. We can never really know the pain that is associated with navigating the world in a larger body – or in a body that is oppressed in other ways or in other intersections of ways – but we commit to holding space for you and your experiences.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion statement: Gatewell is proud to open its doors to members of marginalized groups and is committed to centering the voices of the oppressed and to increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion in our field. In collaboration with other professionals, we hope to create a mental health space free of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, weight stigma, and other individual and institutionalized forms of oppression. We believe that liberation is collective; in the words of civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer, “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.”