About Me
Hello, I'm Amy Gould. I have a private practice in Beachwood, Ohio, where people come to share concerns and feelings about the aspects of their lives that need space and time set aside, to reflect and think about the things that matter most.
 
I am a Licensed Professional Clinical Counselor with supervisory designation (LPCC-S), which means I am able to help people with mental and emotional concerns and can also supervise counselors working toward licensure, though I am not taking on supervisees at this time. I am also a National Certified Counselor (NCC) and a Certified Clinical Mental Health Counselor (CCMHC), and I hold certification in clinical hypnosis as an Approved Consultant with the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis.
 
My early work included volunteering with the Cleveland Rape Crisis Center, and internships at The Free Clinic of Greater Cleveland and Jewish Family Service Association (JFSA). In the years since, I have done significant work with veterans and with trauma and abuse survivors.
 
The Work I Do
I have always wanted to know how a person came to be who they are. That is much of what I am listening for early on: the influences and the turning points, the way you talk about the people who raised you, the parts you move past quickly. It is how I come to understand someone's world well enough to be useful in it.
 
As I developed as a counselor, I began to see patterns in how traumatic life events and other significant experiences change people and their views, sometimes overnight. It made me realize just how fast a person can change under certain circumstances. That has stayed with me, because it also means change in the other direction can happen faster than people expect.
 
In my study of PTSD and trauma, I saw how deeply the impact of trauma, abuse, and war can alter someone. Some of what people carry does not translate into ordinary language: the horror of a suicide scene, the body bag, the life and death decisions made in a split second. When a young man comes home from war, there may be what Robert Jay Lifton called the "death imprint." It is something his mother recognizes but cannot name, except to say that the son who left for war is not the same son who came home.
 
Dissociation occurs naturally in ordinary life: not hearing the person talking to you, not recalling the drive home, being able to recount the facts of something without the emotional experience of those facts. It is a skill of resiliency, and it protects. Dissociation is, among other things, a fast defense against the feeling of annihilation.
 
When a child grows up with severe and repeated abuse, that same capacity gets used early and often, before the personality has finished forming, and what develops is something more divided than a single cohesive sense of self. That is Dissociative Identity Disorder. It is more common than most people realize, and it looks very little like what people have seen in movies. There is usually no dramatic switching, no one obviously becoming a different person in front of you. What people describe instead is losing time, finding things at home they do not remember buying, or hearing about conversations they have no memory of, and most of them have long since concluded that something is deeply wrong with them. I have worked with dissociation across that range for many years, and I have found that hearing it named plainly is often the first relief someone feels.
 
I was drawn to this work early in my career because I saw how often traumatic experience, including war and early childhood trauma, was connected to a range of other conditions: anxiety, depression, panic attacks, relationship problems, alcohol and drug use, addiction, and even physical manifestations such as hypertension and chronic pain. PTSD is a whole body-mind-spirit response. It is physical, it is mental and emotional, and it is spiritual. The breadth and depth of this work drew me in.
 
Beginning Therapy
How therapy begins and unfolds depends on what brought you here: your initial concerns, whether you are in crisis, work you may have done before, and what you are living with right now.
 
When something recent has happened, and especially when it stirs up older material, the early work is usually about stabilization. We establish physical and emotional safety and get the immediate disruption to a more manageable place before going further. There is no requirement to tell me your whole history in the first session, or the fifth. You can say as much or as little as you want, and we will still have plenty to work with.
 
Working With Me
I have a genuine interest in knowing who you are, where you struggle, and what you are trying to do, whether you want to make sense of the past, build a better future, or feel more real and whole.
 
I will ask you questions intended to provoke thought and reflection. I do not usually give advice. I would rather help you think something through and explore your options, because in my experience people arrive at solutions that fit their lives better than anything I could have handed them. Working collaboratively in this way, I hope to help you build your self-reliance and a strong emotional foundation. I can work in more structured ways when that is what someone needs, though my general approach is less directive, giving you the emotional space to find yourself in the process.
 
I hope to help you see the patterns in your life: how they repeat, how they began, what you react to, what sets off a panic attack, what your dreams may be telling you, and through all of it, to see yourself more clearly. Therapy is about awareness and insight, and it is also about change. In your therapy with me, you have the freedom to explore what is important to you, to express yourself in the ways you wish to express yourself, and to change what you wish to change.
 
This kind of deeper exploration, looking at what drives you, how you relate to yourself, and the dynamics in the relationships that matter most, is never mandatory. It is an avenue available to you whenever you feel ready.
 
Growth, Pace, and Endings
Progress is rarely a straight line. There may be stretches where it feels slow, and other times when things move so quickly that you look back and realize suddenly how far you have come. Meaningful change can ask you to sit with difficult feelings, question assumptions you have held for a long time, and consider possibilities you cannot quite see yet. It can also arrive in a rush. Both of those are normal.
 
Reaching a goal does not have to mean you are finished. Insurance coverage tends to be built around a straightforward sequence of setting a goal, meeting it, and ending therapy, and for many people that is exactly right. If you want to keep going, deeper or in a new direction, that is a decision I would rather we make together.
 
When you are ready to step away, whether for a break, from a real sense of completion, or because your circumstances have changed, that choice is entirely yours. What I do value is the chance to close deliberately, to look back at what you have accomplished, name what is still unfinished, and identify where you might want support down the road. Many people come back later when something new comes up, and that is a normal part of the work.