Values𖥸

The Hope Preserve functions by values that guide who we are as a team, how we present to our communities, and how we operate our systems and processes. We hire staff who bring these values to life and who receive life from our vulnerable attempts to live these values together. 

Integration is Emotional Safety:

• A safe therapist has done and is doing their own inner work and accountability work. 

• Boundaries and differentiation naturally occur as we reintegrate with lost or avoided parts of ourselves. We see differentiation and integration as two sides of the same coin and have been richly rooted in a non-pathologizing, consent-oriented IFS/Parts Work framework for over a decade. 

Non-performance - being rather than doing

• A non-judging therapist is curious and does not impose their personal or learned standard of “health” or “wholeness.” They honor the empowerment of clients to connect with their own values and hopes. 

• Being relief instead of promising relief: We don’t make promises about the future outcomes of relief we can provide; we deliver our outcome-generating services on a process of relief every step of the way. We build everything we do around making our admin and services delightful to interact with and teaching clients' nervous systems what it's like not to have to fight against something every time they want to do something nice for themselves. 

• Unmasking (as is personally safe in given contexts): We’re not here to extract adherence to cultural and neuro-normative standards from our clients or employees. We hope to be open with the accommodations we afford ourselves as we go about our daily lives and business - creative, courageous, authentic personal expression. Varying intersections of privilege and safety greatly affect folks’ ability to unmask, and we hire team members who can hold sacred space not just for their own unmasking, but for their peers’ and clients’ as well. 

• Relief rather than behavior modification: We don’t believe in “fixing” clients or measuring their growth via “healthy behavior” markers. We want to support them in how they experience their lives and the world - and in discovering what their own markers for healing or growth are. We hope they have a sense of relief, experiencing their surroundings as less harsh, and feel more alive to their positive experiences - if that’s what they also hope.

Reverence:

• A reverent therapist honors the client as the expert on their own life and respects mystery, curiosity, consent, and self-authorization. 

• We love to nerd out on neurobiology, but there is always more to discover and we assume that some of what we’re saying now will eventually be upturned. We psychoeducate but we don’t indoctrinate. In our spaces the assumption is that n=1. We listen to clients as individuals and help them based on their unique experience of the world and their lived experience of their symptoms/frustrations rather than assuming we know best. 

• Warmth and aesthetics: We want our spaces to be alive and to feel like an active participant in the sacred and magical work that happens within them. The warmth we share must permeate our relationships as well, and we seek to create an environment for clients and fellow team members that actually feels nurturing and doesn’t just perform aesthetics or social-worthy backdrops. 

Connection and collaboration - together we can do what would crush us individually

• Clinician Benefit: We created our group to make a great place for great people to work. We intend for our clinicians to benefit from the same nervous-system-friendly systems and processes as our clients, and expect their caseloads to leave breathing room for their own personal wellbeing while making a livable wage. 

• Collective benefit: Though there is individualized, intricately attuned work to be done, and we do help a lot with that part, healing does not happen in a vacuum. We seek increasingly to align with liberation psychology/theology and believe that we’re free when we’re all free. 

• Inclusion: We seek ever increasingly to be a team of varying backgrounds, experiences, beliefs, and specialties that feels welcoming to clients of the same. It’s imperative to us that our office function from a foundation of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in its assumptions, culture, and practice. We aren’t near done listening, taking accountability, or doing our work, but invite you to join with us as we continually learn and unlearn in our areas of privilege and unconscious bias.