Meet Our Second One Life Only Consultant for Couples and Family Counseling!

Dr. Blake Evans, One Life Only Consultant for Couples and Family Counseling

During a workshop with Dr. Steven Hayes, I badgered him about what approach to use for couples therapy that is consistent with functional contextual principles.  One of them he mentioned was new to me and I haven’t tried before.  The approach is called Integrative Behavioral Couples Therapy (IBCT)!  With the kind heart of Dr. Andrew Christensen, one of the co-developers of IBCT, I was allowed to attend one of his workshops online.  He eventually referred me to Dr. Blake Evans, one of his certified IBCT therapists, to help me with developing my skills in IBCT.

It has been a rich experience consulting with Dr. Evans and I find so much joy working with him.

Here’s a short bio of Dr. Evans, our One Life Only Consultant for Couples and Family Therapy:

Dr. Blake Evans is a Staff Psychologist at a satellite clinic of the St. Cloud VA HealthCare System in Alexandria, Minnesota.  He obtained his doctoral degree in clinical psychology at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Oklahoma, internship at the Battle Creek VA Medical Center in Battle Creek, Michigan, and post-doctoral fellowship at the Minneapolis VA Medical Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. 

He holds a collateral position as a national trainer/consultant for the VA Family Services Division OMHS-SP for Integrated Behavioral Couple Therapy (IBCT) and was previously a trainer/consultant for Behavioral Family Therapy (BFT). 

His primary professional interests lie in the assessment and treatment of relationship difficulties as well as a variety of conditions including trauma-related disorders, affective and anxiety disorders, and personality disorders.  Dr. Evans’ interests also include training, consultation, and program design/improvement. 

His theoretical orientation is cognitive-behavioral, with an emphasis on contemporary behavioral approaches, including Integrated Behavioral Couple Therapy (IBCT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), and Motivational Interviewing (MI).

Thank you Blake!  I have had so much enlightenment in our discussions.  I count it a privilege to have you part of this One Life Only team!

Nathan

We’re Back at our West Avenue Office!

Hello everyone!

We are very pleased to announce to you that we are back at our West Avenue office starting Wednesday, March 30, 2022! 

The address again is:

CMS Clinic

2nd Floor Back to the Bible Building

135 West Avenue, Quezon City, Philippines!

We can see there every Wednesdays between 10:00 am to 12:00 noon!

See you all there!

Get to know the difference in our approach to counseling…in 30 minutes!

I am quite sure that many of you think that all of the counseling practices being offered in the Philippines are just the same.  Pretty much about common sense advice to deal with your difficulties in the secret life you and I have in our minds.  You probably hear a lot of these in talk shows and see them online in your Google searches.  

I must admit that from 2009 up to 2019, my practice varied only slightly from what was and is still widely available in the Philippines, that of a syndromal and symptom-reduction approach to therapy.  

Since 2019 though, I have come across an approach that I believe jumps out as the most scientifically sound that I have ever experienced applying in my own life, as well as those that I have helped in the past two years or so!

In my zeal and excitement to share this with you, I am now offering a 30-minute session that is packed with enough information for you to see how this relatively new approach in the field of counseling and psychology works so well, and why it is now the most researched method in the world for the last 20 years! 

What you will be shown is what Dr. Kevin Polk calls the Psychological Flexibility Point of View, which can neatly sum up this approach to therapy in just 30 minutes!

Feel free to reach out to us and book yourself a quick 30-minute appointment that we are confident will change your life’s direction!  Yes, that’s all we ask!  Thirty minutes and you are free to decide if you wish to continue your work with us or not.

You can be an individual, a couple, or a family. Just take 30 minutes of your time and see if this is something that will explain best why you and I struggle within our mental worlds!

Call or message me now at 0917 886 LIFE (5433)!  I’d be more than excited to share my newfound knowledge with you, so you can start your journey towards creating that best version of you that you’ve always wanted!

We’re now on Spotify!

Hi everyone!

We are sure you get busy sometimes, with little time to spare reading our blogposts. Here’s a surefire way you can keep up with our posts even when you are traveling, driving, or just busy with house chores!

You can now listen to our blogposts through our One Life Only Counseling Spotify Channel!

Yes! You read it right! Just search for us using the search words, “One Life Only Counseling!” and you’ll find us our channel: One Life Only Counseling!

I hope you enjoy it! We look forward to you following our One Life Only Counseling Spotify Channel!

What is One Life Only Counseling about?

Hi everybody! We have recently updated our definition of what One Life Counseling is all about. In our zeal and dedication to provide you with the best possible results in your quest to change your lives for the better, we began our new journey towards a process-based approach to our work. This applies to all our clients including couples and families.

We will never be satisfied unless we find the best possible and most effective approaches that empower you and help direct you to a path of growth and personal satisfaction in living the kind of life you have long wanted for yourself and your loved ones!

We have put the updates in italics.

Here’s what you can expect from One Life Only Counseling:

You can be assured that your information with be kept completely confidential.

You will be respected regardless of your religion, gender preference, ethnicity, economic status, and even your personal lifestyle and values.

Your counselor will not impose his or her values and beliefs on you.

We use brief, scientific, and evidence-based approaches to address your concerns. These approaches are known to produce the best results that require only a handful to about a dozen sessions for you to experience life-changing results, as against years of seeing a therapist which can, at its worst, foster dependency.

Since 2019, we have adopted new therapy approaches that do not categorize people into sets of symptoms. They are process-based approaches to therapy that are now gaining appreciation from thousands of experts in the field who have found the current symptom-reduction, syndromal approaches less than adequate in addressing the human condition. The process-based approach has been found to be effective in many areas of concern ranging from common mental health concerns like depression and anxiety to even work and sports performance.

Since 2019, we have been very excited to offer this type of a radically different approach to therapy that is not just about relieving symptoms, but rather helping people towards creating lives imbued with meaning and purpose.

This is content is the subject of our first podcast in our One Life Only Counseling Spotify Channel! If you wish to hear this on Spotify, click here!

Grief Counseling Module with Russ Harris

Nathan just finished another training module with renowned author and ACT therapist from Australia, Dr. Russ Harris!

Twelve Years of One Life Only, Twelve Years of Trust and Hope in Our Humanity!

by Nathan Chua

As I write this post, there is trepidation about the future given the situation we find ourselves in, as we are mired in a brutal, endless pandemic, and a perpetual and rigid lockdown response; and to add to that, certain groups wanting to take advantage of the weakness of others as they occupy territories that deprive small fisher folks of their sole livelihood, while simultaneously putting the region on the precipice of war, just because one group cannot stand the independence of another; I must admit that sometimes I begin to lose hope that change for a better human race and planet can ever be attainable.   

I thought maybe it would be good to write about why One Life Only exists and why we should even care about change, given the bleak nature of our current circumstances.  My optimism comes from a firm belief that humans are capable of making the hard choices in the service of the greater good.  Given the right circumstances, we are able to do acts that our very pragmatic, my-personal-survival-first minds cannot comprehend.  

I was neither skeptical nor exuberant about finding the best means for change in my life through psychology.  I took an undergraduate degree in psychology plainly for the reason that I wanted to understand why I was who I was.  I then turned to several other paths that for me, ultimately proved ineffectual.  I thought then that I would find the answers in my mind, and that a logical and mathematical mind would save me from my problems in living.  If I could figure it out then I can see the change sooner rather than later.  Maybe I needed to be smarter and more informed.  But all that knowledge of how to accomplish my material and culturally-acceptable goals, actually made me even worse!

The next step in my life was to turn towards the divine.  I saw how people in church seemed to have it all together as I met them in the course of my young career as a businessman.  Alas, it had a ceiling.  Change was for the most part, superficially based on a hope that I found something that had held life’s truths, and the most plausible explanations for my existence.  

I never thought that science would have a path for me towards improving who I can become.  Science seemed to have this cold calculating aura for me.  Further still, I never thought that psychology would ever be a true science.  I pursued the path left by Freud and existential philosophy to find the answers.  I never gave behaviorism a second look.  I didn’t want to associate myself with a group of people who think that humans are just as trainable as animals!  

But lo and behold, I found the answers in precisely this last option.  Who knows?  There could be better answers out there in the future, but for now, the science of behavior has given me fresh wind.  So I have come full circle to psychology, but this time not the artsy type, but the sciency type.  

I must add though that throughout the course of my search for the truths of our existence, I had one thing undergirding all of my efforts.  I always had that instinct that most of it had to do with love.  In my twenties and thirties, I thought that I should love my business and the people who helped me build it.  In my journey through religion, I said love trumps doctrine.  In my study of psychology, I loved the artsy parts, but never loved science, until I found it in a lesser known approach in behavioral science called, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT.

Here’s how the developer of ACT has framed it, or here’s how science can be an exercise in love.  

“Humanity is in a race, a race to create a kinder, more flexible and values-based world–to say it another way, a more loving world…Either we will learn how to create modern minds for this modern world of ours, or we will loom ever closer to disaster.

None of us knows how it will turn out, but based on human history, I put my bet on the human community evolving to meet the challenge.  I put my bet on our capacity to choose love over fear…Deep down, we all know that love isn’t everything, it’s the only thing,” Steven C. Hayes.

If there is one thing that can save the world, at the moment, it is science.  And it happens to be a science of love that can ensure that the human species will continue to prosper and preserve the wonders of this planet. 

Perhaps that is what truly brought me to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.  For in love, there has to be genuine acceptance and a stubborn commitment to do what our logical minds would never understand.  In ACT, I think I found the science behind love, the only thing that matters, which I just found out, not just for me, but for everybody else. 

Happy 12th One Life Only!