Nick Vaske (he/him)

I have spent the last three years working specifically with adults with severe mental illness including bipolar disorders in varying stages of recovery. I also have lived experience with bipolar disorder that I can draw from when it is helpful to relate, while also recognizing that everyone's experience is unique.

I am a queer-identified person and member of the LGBTQIA+ community. I have worked with adults and youth in both inpatient and outpatient settings around their sexual orientations and gender identities to build knowledge, understanding, self-compassion, and appreciation for how wonderful they are, find community, and better cope with a society that is often oppressive.

Most of my career has been working with youth in foster care, mentoring, and in residential placements for youth who have been adjudicated and are on probation or parole. I am experienced working with youth with behavioral struggles, figuring out their identity, dealing with substance abuse, legal problems, or emerging mental health disorders. The clients I've worked with have expected me to be someone they can relate to as well, and I am goofy, a gamer, sometimes inappropriate and patient.

My graduate training is primarily in narrative therapy, and my approach is to engage in self-exploration by taking an outside, curious perspective of ourselves and our stories, gain greater insight into the events that have shaped us, enrich our stories by recognizing our resilience, and use that knowledge and perspective to better define what we would like our futures to be.

I have many years of experience working in residential, day treatment, and outpatient programs that use CBT individual and group counseling approaches to help both youth and adults understand how our thought processes influence how we feel and act as well as learn specific skills that help us to more effectively accomplish their goals.

We do not live in isolation, and our relationships to others and to our communities and culture influence us in many ways. Relational therapy aims to understand how the relationships in our lives and cultural/systemic forces shape who we are, and how we are doing in turn influences our relationships. The therapeutic relationship offers a direct experiential opportunity for us to explore and work on relationship dynamics.

Rather than having one solid personality, we have multiple internal parts or subpersonalities that developed to help us cope with intense situations and have taken on extreme thoughts, feelings or behaviors. This can look like getting flooded suddenly by anxiety, an internal debate that goes in circles, a highly critical voice, an addictive behavior, or a physical sensation. With IFS, we work to get to know and appreciate our parts so they can take on more helpful roles in our current life.

Most of my career has been working with youth in foster care, mentoring, and in residential placements for youth who have been adjudicated and are on probation or parole. I am experienced working with youth with behavioral struggles, figuring out their identity, dealing with substance abuse, legal problems, or emerging mental health disorders. The clients I've worked with have expected me to be someone they can relate to as well, and I am goofy, a gamer, sometimes inappropriate and patient.

Most of my career has been working with youth in foster care, mentoring, and in residential placements for youth who have been adjudicated and are on probation or parole. I am experienced working with youth with behavioral struggles, figuring out their identity, dealing with substance abuse, legal problems, or emerging mental health disorders. The clients I've worked with have expected me to be someone they can relate to as well, and I am goofy, a gamer, sometimes inappropriate and patient.