Charlotte Howard, Ph.D.

Love Yourself

Over the past 10 years in practice I have seen a consistent theme of underlying pain stemming from a lack of self-love. Loving yourself is what provides resilience when you make mistakes or get hurt in relationships. You are not alone if you are critical and mean to yourself or feel ashamed of who you are. Through that lens, everything looks bleak—not even successes, love and closeness with others can be fully enjoyed. Shame prevents full connection and the ability to be open and free. It can also lead to self-destructive, addictive, or numbing behaviors.  When you don’t love yourself, you may even unintentionally choose partners or friends who don’t value you either and reinforce your skewed self-image.  Your negative view of yourself is not your fault. It means you didn’t get what you needed to feel valued somewhere along the way. Those wounds that lead to not loving yourself can be healed with the right care. I enjoy joining clients on a rescue mission for their true selves and helping them discover and own their inner beauty and worth.  It is truly possible to love yourself and have a nurturing relationship with yourself, letting go of the burden of shame and self-hatred. You will find self-love changes the quality of every aspect of your life.

Stress & Social Anxiety

I also specialize in relieving social anxiety, stress, tension, & panic disorders. Many of my clients are highly successful and driven, and find stress beginning to decrease their quality of life.  High stress is not necessary to perform well and succeed in busy lives–stress can be minimized without affecting efficiency and productivity.  Many times stress is fueled by underlying feelings of inadequacy and fear of failure or need to be perfect.  Together we can help you hold yourself and your life in a way that brings you peace–with self-respect and self-love.

Social anxiety is another form of stress that is crippling for many of my clients.  Their lives are limited by where they feel comfortable and they often long for more contact and connection but are scared to go after it or don’t know how. Social anxiety, though overwhelming, is actually not difficult to treat.  My background in movement and body awareness provides the foundation for walking you through the latest researched interventions for stress and social anxiety. These include mindfulness, cognitive interventions, and relaxation training for clients wanting to learn coping strategies in addition to addressing the underlying causes of the anxiety. Group is also a powerful way to address and change social anxiety.  It helps you learn to love yourself and understand yourself in relationship. Exploring your beliefs and feelings about yourself and others creates confidence and comfort with who you are and with connecting with others (see the group section below).

Existential/Spirituality

Another specialty of mine is helping clients understand their life purpose and feel a sense of meaning and inner sustenance. Research shows that therapy is most effective when it incorporates and builds on clients’ strengths. In addition, the majority of actual clients surveyed in large studies report wishing their spiritual lives were addressed in therapy. If you are part of this group, I encourage you to bring this desire up with me. We can utilize your spiritual perspective and experiences in understanding your life and who you are, and in discovering a future that is consistent with your sense of what is important to you. Self-love also plays a large role in meaning and connection to life. Learning to love yourself can powerfully transform your experience of life and existential peace.

Executives, Therapists, & Health Care Providers

I am passionate about helping those who help others or who make decisions that impact many. Restoring leaders who are worn down by the high demands of their careers and families, so that they can simultaneously continue to contribute and also feel great about their lives, is highly fulfilling. I end up doing a fair amount of business coaching incorporated into therapy.  A relatively large number of my clients are therapists or therapists-in-training and I greatly enjoy bringing nonjudgemental, deep holding and exploration to fellow therapists. I also have groups with many therapists in them if you are looking for an emotionally-sophisticated group.

Couples & Groups

Couples counseling and group therapy are ways of addressing in real time the emotions that come up in relationships and how we respond to these feelings in ways that serve us and ways that don’t.

Group is 90 minutes a week in a group of 10-12 people exploring feelings in relationship.  In group we observe the nuances of how people relate to each other and then understand how these subtleties cause and maintain their problematic patterns in relationships. Members begin deeply understanding who they are in relationships, which allows greater flexibility, awareness, and choice. Exploring how we feel with, and respond to, others exposes where we need healing of past wounds and no-longer-effective coping strategies, and reveals the way to healthy connections, self-care, and a sense of meaning.

In Couple’s work, couples speak honestly about their feelings in the relationship. They are able to understand and address the sources of pain while learning to effectively nurture the seeds of potential. As their communication patterns change, they often find the real compassion and understanding that they have been longing for from each other. Couples are often surprised by how quickly they can return to love and commitment with the right support making adjustments to key outer and inner aspects of their relationship.

Background

I attended Middlebury College in Vermont and was one of two people granted permission to create my own major, which I called “Therapy as a Synthesis of Mind, Body, Spirit, & Sense of Place.” This major combined modern dance, environmental studies, literature, psychology, and religion, providing a foundation for my holistic and multidimensional therapy approach. I received a full fellowship to graduate school in Counseling Psychology, only awarded to a handful of incoming graduate students at the University of Iowa. While receiving my doctorate I taught movement improvisation and Authentic Movement, a therapeutic movement form, in the dance department. I also taught Developmental Psychology and saw clients for therapy in several schools and Universities, and one Women’s Resource & Action Center.

My internship was at the University of Texas Counseling & Mental Health Center working with college and graduate students and taking referrals from the physicians at the Health Center to address physical health issues that are tied to mental health, such as eating disorders, headaches, tension, panic attacks, digestive problems (such as irritable bowel syndrome), sleep disorders, and chronic pain.  I also led a technique-based group for reducing social anxiety and stress. In addition to my Ph.D., I also received 5 years of training in holistic healing at the Jaffe Institute for Spiritual & Medical Healing. This training provides the basis for the existential work I do, as well as allowing me to easily incorporate clients’ spiritual lives into their healing process when they request it.

Other

• One of the few Austin psychologists who is a Certified Group Psychotherapist.
• Recipient of the Presidential Fellowship at the University of Iowa awarded each year to only a handful of the thousands of incoming graduate students
• Led over 1800 psychotherapy groups
• Past presenter at the American Psychological Association, as well as the American Group Psychotherapy Association
• 8 research publications in national & international professional psychology journals
• Creator of YourselfTruly.com online program to help women love themselves
• Author of self-help book for couples, Awaken to Love
• Special training in Relationship Issues, Anxiety & Panic Disorders, Existential Concerns, Parenting, & Group
• Additional areas of clinical experience: Depression, Bipolar, OCD, Eating Disorders, Personality Disorders, IBS, parenting, sexual concerns, Sleep Disorders, gender and sexual identity issues, life/career planning & motivation, chronic headaches, loss & trauma, and more.

Awaken To Love

I wrote this book to help you in your relationships and use your relationship as a way to grow spiritually and to heal yourself and your partner. Awaken to Love combines the wisdom from spiritual and psychological approaches to transform and enrich the love between partners. It is for spiritual people, of any religion or spiritual path, who are ready to heal or deepen a committed relationship.

“Awaken to Love engages the heart, mind, & soul of the reader. Dr. Howard has given us a unique, brilliantly-written spiritual & psychological guide to long-lasting, deeply-felt, heart to heart relationships.”

— Hannelore Hanson, Order of the Sisters of St. Francis

Available through Amazon.com, by clicking the “buy now” button below to purchase online through Paypal.

Notes Received from Readers

“We are reading your book together and it is been a miracle for us individually and as a couple.”

“The book you loaned us by Charlotte Howard is marvelous. We read it aloud to each other while we were at the beach, and we actually had opportunities to do what she suggested when things come up. We spent some deeply spiritual time with each other, and emotional issues arose. Having the suggestions from Dr. Howard were very helpful. And they worked! And brought us ever closer together. We are so grateful you shared this book with us. I think I’ll have to get my own copy. Thanks again.”

“It is a delightful, loving kind and gentle book – she has done a great job describing the self talk necessary to allow love to expand in your heart and has brought me to tears several times – I look forward to savoring it for a while – please tell her for me what a nice job.”