philosophy & approach:

Statement of Faith: 

Poiema adheres to all three of the historic (lowercase) catholic creeds — the Apostles’, the Nicene, and the Athanasian.

Core Values:

  • Empowering healing, recovery and growth from sin and suffering

  • Utilizing internal conflict as an opportunity to connect more deeply and fully with God, self, community and creation.

  • Approaching role of counselor / spiritual director as a wounded healer.

  • Gentle, patient, curious faithful presence with clients in a collaborative process.

  • Emphasis of awareness and participation in communion with God’s presence as the essential catalyst for transformation and wholeness.

  • Helping people form identity and shape purpose rooted in faith, hope and love in Christ.

  • Encouraging meaningful connection through the redemptive community of the church.

  • Advocating for churches to cultivate redemptive communities conducive for recovery.

Dynamics of Approach:

  • Trinitarian

  • distinctively Christian worldview, theologically orthodox, reformed- catholicity

  • Augustinian theological anthropology

  • complex, multi-faceted view of person as embodied soul made in God's image

  • psychology of worship

  • theology of desire (rightly ordered love)

  • Spirit-led discernment

  • collaborative and evocative, client-centered relational approach

  • complex, multi-faceted view of person as embodied soul made in God's image

  • theo-dramatic emphasis on our stories and how they weave together with God’s grand narrative

  • nuanced distinction between sin & suffering

  • sin as pervasive and progressive (corruption, perversion, pollution, disintegration)

  • transformative change motivated by the beauty, truth and goodness of God's love

  • incremental, progressive sanctification (repentance, faith, obedience)

  • growth set mentality / beginner’s mind model of empowerment, resilience and sustainability

  • evidence-based, recovery-oriented systems of care

  • clinically-informed

  • trauma-informed care

  • contextualized cultural competence

  • willing to collaborate with local churches and/or family support

“We never know self-realization. We are two abysses - a well staring at the sky.”

~Fernando Pessoa

"The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities."

~ Gilles Deleuze

“Your soul is the priestess of memory, selecting, sifting, and ultimately gathering your vanishing days toward presence.”

~John O’Donohue

“I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.”
~Friedrich Nietzsche

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Haarlem, Netherlands

“And we urge you, brothers and sisters, warn those who are idle and disruptive, encourage the disheartened, help the weak, be patient with everyone.”

~1 Thessalonians 5:14

"One could say that part of the task is to help the body of Christ find the lines of intersection, define the points of tension, discern the trajectories of implication, and chart a course for faithful practice going forward."

~James K. A. Smith