“We don’t so much solve our problems as we outgrow them. We add capacities and experiences that eventually make us bigger than the problems.”
— CG Jung

About Chuck Hancock, M.Ed., LPC, LMHC

 

Jungian & Relational Psychotherapy

I am a psychotherapist and Jungian analyst-in-training with more than 16 years of clinical experience working with individuals, couples, and groups. My primary orientation is Jungian, psychoanalytic, and relational. I work with people who want not only relief from symptoms, but a deeper understanding of the unconscious patterns, relationships, conflicts, and questions of meaning that shape their lives.

Many of the people who come to me are thoughtful, capable, and successful in important areas of their lives. They may have already done therapy, developed considerable self-awareness, or learned effective ways of managing their difficulties. Yet something remains unresolved. The same relationship patterns return. Achievement no longer feels as satisfying as it once did. A transition disrupts an established identity. Dreams become more vivid. Anxiety, depression, loneliness, or dissatisfaction seem to be pointing toward something that cannot be addressed simply by trying harder or functioning better.

This is where depth psychotherapy can be particularly valuable.

 

Therapy That Goes Beneath the Symptom

From a Jungian and psychoanalytic perspective, symptoms are not simply problems to eliminate. They can also tell us something important about conflicts, needs, emotions, and aspects of ourselves that have not yet found an adequate place in conscious life.

Therapy therefore involves more than asking, “How do I make this feeling go away?”

We may also ask:

What is happening beneath it? Why does this particular pattern keep returning? What has been excluded, neglected, or left undeveloped? What does this difficulty reveal about the way I relate to myself and other people? And what might my life be asking of me now?

Jung called the larger developmental process of becoming more fully oneself individuation. I think of it in fairly practical terms: discovering value in parts of ourselves that have been ignored, rejected, overcontrolled, or left undeveloped, and gradually developing a life spacious enough to include more of who we actually are.

 

Jungian Analysis Without the Mystification

Jungian psychology is sometimes presented as obscure or esoteric. I don’t believe it needs to be. If it’s overly complicated or doesn’t work, it’s not useful.  But Jungian Analysis is extremely useful in helping you know yourself and the world better and helping you transform in a lasting way.

The psyche often communicates through images, dreams, emotions, fantasies, relationships, symptoms, and recurring patterns rather than straightforward explanations. The work of therapy is partly one of translation: taking direct psychological experience that is difficult to understand and finding language for what it may be expressing.

Dreams, for example, can be extraordinarily useful, but I don’t approach them as puzzles with predetermined meanings. We become curious about the images together and explore their personal associations, emotional context, symbolic possibilities, and relationship to what is happening in your life.

The same applies to Jungian ideas such as shadow, complexes, archetypes, persona, and the Self. These concepts are useful only insofar as they help us understand your actual experience. If psychological theory cannot eventually be translated into ordinary human life, it isn’t doing its job.

 

A Relational Approach to Depth Work

Although my work is deeply informed by Jung, I also draw extensively from contemporary psychoanalytic and relational traditions.

Therapy does not happen to an isolated psyche. We become who we are through relationships, and many of our deepest patterns become visible in relationships, including the relationship that develops between therapist and client.

For this reason, I pay close attention not only to the stories you tell about your life, but also to what happens between us in the room: moments of closeness and distance, expectations, misunderstandings, emotional reactions, things that become difficult to say, and patterns that may quietly repeat themselves.

These experiences are not distractions from the therapy. Often, they are the therapy.

When approached with curiosity rather than judgment, the therapeutic relationship becomes a place where unconscious relational patterns can gradually become visible, understandable, and open to change.

 

My Analytic Training

My commitment to this work extends beyond an interest in Jungian ideas. I am currently completing formal analytic training with the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association (JPA) in New York City and Interpersonal Process Group facilitation through the AGPA (American Group Psychotherapy Association).

Becoming a Jungian analyst involves years of advanced theoretical and clinical study, supervised analytic work, and one’s own personal analysis. This matters to me because depth psychotherapy asks the therapist to do more than master techniques. The therapist must also continually examine the personal assumptions, emotional reactions, blind spots, and unconscious material that inevitably enter the therapeutic relationship.  The way I see it, a therapist’s own therapy is never done.  I’m always learning and growing throughout life.

I consider that process an essential part of practicing this work responsibly.

My analytic training builds upon more than 16 years of experience as a psychotherapist working with individuals, relationships, and therapy groups. Over those years, my work has increasingly centered on the places where Jungian psychology, contemporary psychoanalysis, interpersonal process, and relational psychotherapy meet.

 

Who I Work Best With

I particularly enjoy working with adults who are curious about themselves and willing to engage the deeper questions of their lives.

You do not need to know anything about Jung or psychoanalysis before beginning therapy. You do need some willingness to become curious about your experience rather than simply trying to correct it.

My work may be particularly useful if you are:

• entering or moving through a significant midlife transition

• successful or highly functional but finding that achievement no longer provides the meaning it once did

• repeating painful relationship or intimacy patterns

• struggling with identity, purpose, creativity, loneliness, or belonging

• interested in understanding recurring dreams, images, or emotional patterns

• confronting questions about aging, gender, relationships, vocation, or the direction of the second half of life

• finding that previous therapy helped, but wanting to understand yourself at a deeper level

• interested in long-term psychological development rather than symptom management alone

My goal is not to tell you who you should become. It is to create the conditions in which we can become increasingly curious about who you already are, what has remained outside your awareness, and what may be trying to emerge next.

 

I’m passionate about helping people discover, release and move past fear and limitations to discover their true self, true desires and fully experience living their own life. I’ve been stuck, limited, and in pain myself, so I know what it’s like.  I’ve also sought experiences with many people who claimed they had the way or the answers, only to learn they were only promoting “their” way, not helping me discover mine.  There are many “healers” out there today with much less training, experience, or accountability.  As a licensed professional counselor (LPC) in Colorado and licensed mental health counselor (LMHC) in New York, with extensive training and experience with trauma and depth psychology, I can help you safely explore deep core issues and find your unique way to journey through the healing process with strength, grace, and true growth.

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” ~ Socrates

 It seems like our society may have forgotten that the etymology of the word “psychology” means the study of the soul.  So I consider my role to be a holder of healing container large enough to include and work with all parts of you, including your mind, emotions, body, soul, and all of your relations.  My own healing journey has led me to experiences as a student and client of psychotherapy, dreamwork, bodywork, yoga, meditation, nature-based rituals such as vision quest, sweat lodge, medicine-assisted therapy, and much more.  After brief moments of thinking, each one of these things was the best thing ever and the medicine everyone needed. The truth is that all modalities have value at different times in our lives, and the healing container has to be big enough to include it all.  For major issues, we don’t solve them; we grow larger than them.  There is evidence to suggest that a depth-oriented approach helps us do that.  Where many therapists focus on learning skills or tools to reduce symptoms, I take the long view for longer-lasting change.  Not just feeling better now (though that certainly does happen), but depth-oriented therapy that “…sets in motion psychological processes that lead to ongoing change, even after therapy has ended.”  My goal is to help you be the expert in and leader of your own life, while having healthy, fulfilling relationships. 

Give a [person] a fish, and you feed [them] for a day. Teach a [person] to fish, and you feed [them] for a lifetime. ~proverb

Before becoming a psychotherapist, I worked in corporate, public education, and higher education.  I never found my fit, and I struggled to feel connected in the world.  I thought I was successful, but I was self-medicating with alcohol, technology, and other distractions.  Don’t get me wrong, I was successful on the surface – a great, valued employee – but I felt sad, hopeless, isolated, and alone.  Not just in my professional life, but with friends and romantic relationships as well.  As a former software engineer, I have found that this vulnerable world of emotions is actually logical and is an important message to help us start our growth.

It’s extremely important for me to create open, authentic relationships with my clients to help them through personal, career or life struggles. Not just because it feels good, but research suggests out of the thousands of ways to do therapy, the quality of relationship is the best predictor of a good outcome.  And when someone asks about my approach to therapy, the most important thing I like to convey is that nobody exists outside of a relationship.  By working on our relationship with self and others, long-lasting change and healing are possible.  

My sessions are about opening up and exploring the truth of what is, both conscious and unconscious, your shadow and your brilliant gold.  My approach is much more dynamic and experiential than a traditional counselor. I utilize present-moment awareness and experiential exercises to move beyond talk.  I also like to incorporate time outdoors as part of therapy and treatment if clients are open to it, and I find it’s a very effective tool in shifting perspective and inspiring new thought patterns.  I’ve had extensive experience apprenticing with indigenous traditions of North and South America, have trained in pan-cultural rites of passage with School of Lost Borders, and trained in West African ritual with Malidoma Some – all of which has taught me how to make human experience and nature connection culturally relevant to whatever cultural, ethnic, philosophical, or spiritual tradition resonates best with you.

So much of our process is unconscious.  What we do, what we don’t do, what we think, what we don’t think, what we feel, and more are all influenced by past experiences.  When people are mindful of their experience, their choices, the reasons behind those choices, and how they impact the bigger picture of life, it’s the key that unlocks everything else. This is the focus of my counseling philosophy – helping people develop an open, honest relationship with themselves to find clarity, which is critical for creating a fulfilling life. And I wouldn’t be able to connect with the challenge of the personal path in order to help others if I hadn’t walked a similar path myself. It’s why I’m so passionate about the tools and methods I use.

 

Qualifications, Work Experience, and Additional Training

I am registered with the State of Colorado as a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC-11179) and the State of New York as a Licensed Mental Health Counselor (LMHC 016798).  Above and beyond my graduate school training (Master’s Degree in Education from Colorado State University, with a specialization in Counseling and Career Development – a CACREP accredited counseling program), I have studied over 6 years of intensive supervised training and teaching in the Hakomi Method of Experiential Psychotherapy, a mindfulness based, experiential somatic (body) centered therapy. I was a teaching assistant for the Hakomi institute, where I taught and supervised other therapists learning to do mindfulness based depth oriented experiential work and for the past several years I have been in Jungian based psychotherapy training. I am a MAPS trained therapist and supervisor/consultant who worked on the Phase 3 clinical trials for MDMA assisted psychotherapy for the treatment of severe PTSD and I also have training in IFS (Internal Family Systems), psychodrama, and I am an EMDR trained practitioner using evidence based methods to help people heal from the effects of trauma. I’m a student of life and personal growth – I am constantly continuing to learn attending trainings focusing on relationship, attachment, ego state/parts work, archetypal psychology, dream work, experiential, and nature based work to stay current and learn new skills. I’ve completed several years of training in Jungian-oriented psychoanalysis, including completing the Jungian Psychology in Clinical Practice Certificate Program from the C.G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles, and I’m currently an Analyst in Training with the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association of New York.   You can learn more about analytical psychology here and some key concepts of this work here.

For over a decade and a half now, I’ve been counseling people individually, in relationships, and leading groups on a wide variety of topics to help more effectively deal with the pain, suffering, and the ebb and flow of life including dealing with stress, anxiety, depression, moods, relationships, career issues, workplace situations, and using life’s challenges to learn, grow, and find overall meaning, purpose, balance, and alignment in life.

In addition to the work in my private practice, I also have experience with emergency room crisis counseling with UC Health and have facilitated for Outward Bound Professional working with companies and organizations on personal growth, team building, group dynamics, organizational development, leadership, community and relationship building.  

“We must follow nature as a guide, and what the doctor then does is less question of treatment than of developing the creative possibilities latent in the patient [them]self.” -C.G. Jung

For additional information on my specific experience and to see what others have said about working with me, please review my LinkedIn Profile. To set up an appointment, please contact me at [email protected] or (970) 829-0478.