Change is natural. Your next step toward healing and wholeness starts here…
Psychotherapy Services
Psychotherapy offers an opportunity to speak one-on-one with a compassionate listener who can help you express and sort through your thoughts and feelings, identify patterns, develop insights, and build new skills and coping strategies. Each person comes to therapy with their own combination of personality, background, thoughts, emotions, and strategies for navigating the world. At Natural Transformations, we look for the unique strengths that have carried you through the challenges of your life, and build upon those strengths as you cultivate new thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
There is no one-size-fits-all therapeutic approach that works for everyone. Instead, we get to know you, and draw from the solid foundations of a variety of therapeutic models to best employ the methods that hold the strongest potential to meet your needs and accomplish your goals. Therapy sessions might include explorations of your development to understand how you learned to see yourself, others, and navigate the world; cognitive-behavioral (CBT) and narrative therapy strategies to target thoughts about yourself and your life; emotion-focused therapy exercises to enhance emotional expression; and behavioral therapy tools to help manage your symptoms and improve your life. We might employ depth psychological explorations of your imagination, wishes, and dreams; mindfulness practices to help reconnect mind and body; and ecotherapy methods to help cultivate a more authentic self, embodiment, and connection with the natural world and something larger than yourself. We work with individuals, couples, and families to also identify the roles, communication patterns, and challenges you face in relationships, with particular emphasis on family systems and how to develop the communication skills and conflict resolution strategies that can help the family system improve.
We’ll embark together on the journey you’re ready to navigate, where your needs and goals will direct the path we’ll walk together and your motivation and readiness will set the pace.
Psychotherapy Details
Natural Transformations is located in downtown Whitefish and provides psychotherapy services for adolescents and adults. We schedule therapy sessions for individuals, couples, and families:
- Individual sessions typically last 55 minutes, though longer sessions may be requested at the time of appointment scheduling.
- Couples sessions typically last 55-75 minutes. Couples counseling may include sessions with individuals to provide opportunity for the therapist to learn about the relationship in greater depth. Please note, however, that the therapist working with a couple cannot serve as the primary individual therapist for either person in the couplehood. We are happy to provide referrals for individual psychotherapy for the couples we see.
- Family sessions typically last 55-75 minutes. Family therapy may include sessions with individuals to provide opportunity for the therapist to learn about the family system in greater depth. Please note, however, that the therapist working with a family cannot serve as the primary individual therapist for family members. We are happy to provide referrals for individual psychotherapy for the families we see.
We participate in several insurance networks. Check with your insurance carrier to determine if we are a participating provider. If we are not yet a part of your insurance network, you may still be eligible to receive insurance reimbursement for services we offer as an out-of-network provider. Discuss with your insurance company to determine your eligibility. Please contact us with questions about rates and insurance reimbursement.
Ecotherapy Services and Outdoor Activities
A growing body of research highlights that contact with the natural world is beneficial to physical and mental health, something most of us here in Montana have known for a long time! The field of ecopsychology is demonstrating that there are specific activities that have more concentrated benefits, such as “forest bathing” that you may have heard about in recent news and social media. We teach nature-based activities that are specifically designed for psychological healing and wholeness. We offer ecotherapy principles and tools in psychotherapy sessions with individuals, couples, and families, and we also run periodic nature-based group therapy and multi-day therapeutic retreats.
For those seeking nature-based healing and wholeness activities who are not interested in psychotherapy at this time, we offer nature walks with psychological invitations, small group activities to help build connections with the natural world and each other, and multi-day retreats to explore nature connection and how to craft a more soulful life. We also offer nature-based ceremonies and support pan-cultural nature-based rites of passage. Contact us if you are interested in upcoming nature walks, retreats, and other outdoor activities.
Consulting and Educational Services
We work with organizations and companies to help develop your leadership team and employees to their fullest potential. Common topics include leadership, employee self-development, stress management, work-life balance, connection with nature and sustainability, and trauma-informed responsiveness. Research has shown that organizations who address these topics with their employees have empirically demonstrated improvements to employee mental health, organizational dynamics and communications, and productivity. We offer interactive lectures, keynote speeches, workshops, seminars, and can design retreats specifically tailored to your organization’s needs. We also provide individual and small team consultation services based on your goals. Contact us to discuss your needs and interests.
Outdoor education is also a passion of ours, with more than 10 years of experience leading educational groups in classrooms and on the trails of the Crown of the Continent region. Natural Transformations owner, Dr. Stephanie Paidas, has extensive experience in education, having taught on college campuses as well as in the field. We are skilled at integrating the natural sciences with psychological experience, recognizing the parallel processes at work in both psyche and nature. We are proficient at delivering educational content on natural history (including glaciology, geology, flora, fauna, and cultural history topics) while creating an engaging, immersive psychological experience through which individuals can learn and grow. Educational services can range from a 1-hour walk in the woods or a brief keynote address about the benefits of nature connection (or other psychological topics) to multi-day retreats with specific foci. Contact us to discuss your needs and interests.