The Center at St. Andrew’s
….space for healing, community
and lifelong learning.
Counseling Service
From deep listening, new pathways emerge.
At St. Andrew’s, we help you to release the burdens you carry, and to move into richer relationship with yourself, Spirit, and others. Whether through art, movement, speaking, silence, or play, together we listen with curiosity and compassion to all of your inner voices, even those that criticize and blame. We invite their wisdom, courage and positive intent into your life, so that you may have relationships that offer abundance and joy, as well as challenge and growth..
All are welcome.
Marcia Barthelow, M.A., M.S., LMFTA
Director of Counseling and Marriage and Family Therapist
or 206-523-7476, ext. 324
Supporting Low-Income Counseling
Please consider contributing to this important ministry. You may deliver a donation by mail or come in person to check out The Center at St. Andrew’s.
Sometimes those who experience ordinary hurts and even deeper traumas cannot afford therapy. They have no insurance or resources to pay for the help they need. Frequently the type of counseling available in the greater community offers only problem solving approaches but doesn’t address healing on a deeper level. The Center at St. Andrew’s needs support for offsetting the cost of healing which many cannot afford. Your giving generously to The Center at this time makes it possible for us to continue healing for so many people who couldn’t afford it otherwise. Please consider a generous contribution to The Center to underwrite this needed ministry.
Thank you for your compassion and for your generosity in supporting low-income counseling.
Counseling at The Center
Marcia Barthelow, Counseling Director
at The Center at St. Andrew’s “Through counseling and classes, all parts of us are welcome here,” says Cherry Haisten, Program Director of The Center at St. Andrew’s. “This is a joyous place, but we have our sorrows, too.” The center is a place where people can “bring their sorrows and brokenness and find healing and wholeness, so they can go out and serve the world.”
“Fee-based pastoral counseling has always been and always will be a core ministry of the center,” says Peter Strimer, Rector of St. Andrew’s. He explains that a recent change in diocesan policy has meant a shift in the center’s staff. “Before this year, Terry Steig served as director of counseling but a change in diocesan policy required him to take his practice private.” (Steig continues as co-director of The Center.)
Marcia Barthelow, who has served as a counselor at the center for three years, now serves as its director of counseling. In an airy space in the church annex more like a living room than an office, she provides individual, family and couples counseling to clients who come mostly from outside the parish.
“We reach out to people who won’t walk in the front door of the church to bring them in the back door,” she says. She explains that though there is an established hourly fee, parishioners have contributed funds specifically to assist low-income people. “I am confident that we can work something out,” says Barthelow. Along with her extensive education, life experience and wisdom gleaned from deep listening with her clients as well as with her dog, Oso, Barthelow uses the Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapeutic approach, which she says provides “the perfect marination” for psychic and spiritual transformation for herself and her clients. IFS takes the “systems thinking” of the 1980s that helps families and organizations to work together and applies it to the inner self. It is there, according to Barthelow that “different aspects of ourselves that are disconnected or buried can be brought together as a team to work together.” Achieving this balance among the disparate parts of ourselves, in a nonjudgmental setting, she says, “allows clients to tap into the energy of each one to release the power of God’s spirit.”
An enthusiastic believer in the power of the spirit to heal itself, Barthelow says “I love my work because I feel so energized by being with my clients. I’m amazed at how wise and resilient we are, how we each have God’s spirit flowing through us. My work helps release that, and who wouldn’t want that?”
From the article “The Center at St. Andrew’s: It’s Alive!” by Allegra Berrian McFarland in the Winter 2011 edition of Episcopal Voice: The Episcopal Church in Western Washington. For more information, see the Website of the Episcopal Church in Western Washington, Diocese of Olympia.
