Dr. George R. Woodruff, Ph.D. has spent several decades working with children, parents, adults, and older adults in both clinical and non-clinical settings. Throughout those years, one observation has remained consistent: emotional and psychological challenges rarely announce themselves in obvious ways.
Sometimes they appear through a child’s behavior. Sometimes they emerge as we age and find ourselves adjusting to changing physical abilities and life circumstances. Sometimes they present as physical symptoms that seem medical in origin, but are influenced by underlying emotional stressors.
The following areas reflect some of the populations and concerns with which Dr. Woodruff has extensive experience.
Parenting and Child Behavioral Concerns
Understanding the Challenge
There is no “Operating Manual” with a “Trouble-Shooting” section that is attached to our child’s big toe when they are born.
Parenting instructions has been humorously described by the bluntly-spoken comedian Chris Rock as “Just hold on, and try not to die!”, and because most of us did not have a curriculum in school that included a course on how to parent a child with emotional/behavioral issues, we are left with parenting tools that were modeled by our own parents’ treatment of our childhood selves, which we often did not perceive to be understanding of our interior motivations, but more concerned with not calling too much attention to ourselves, and staying out of their hair.
How A Time To Heal Can Help
Dr. Woodruff at A Time To Heal has worked with children and their parents for several decades, in various clinical and non-clinical settings, to ensure that a child experiencing emotional and/or behavioral struggles is accurately conceptualized and communicated with by his/her parents so that they feel well-seen and understood in a manner that gives them a sense that their parents love and support them while assisting them to navigate the steps out of their particular episodic alienation from the parental bond.
Understanding the Emotional Side of Aging
How Counseling Can Support Healthy Adjustment
As we approach our “senior” decades of living on this planet, our bodies and minds begin to signal (sometimes very clearly) that our physical bodies are not everlasting. An emotional/psychological process coincides with our aging process, which involves the necessity to adjust the self-perception and expectations that our younger-selves held, so that we are realistic (and safe) in adjusting our life-styles to reflect our decreasing physiological functions.
Psychotherapy/psychological counseling is often an effective way to learn to gradually shift our self-perception and self-expectations so that they are “updated” to reflect our inevitably-changing physiological functioning.
The benefits of this work are increased peace-of-mind through acceptance of losses, mindfulness of changing functional abilities so that physical and psychological safety is enhanced, and the acquisition of communication tools that ease assisting us to express our increasing physical and emotional needs/requirements that we find ourselves being dependent on families to provide/facilitate for us.
When Physical Symptoms Have Emotional Roots
Why Medical Care and Counseling Work Well Together
Many physical symptoms that we bring to our physician for diagnosis and treatment have not only a physiological origin, but also are often, at least in part, magnified (or even wholly manifestations of) an underlying emotional stressor of either situational or endogenous (genetic/generational) origin.
Since the early 1990s, myriad medical studies have been conducted that compare rates-of-improvement for individuals who receive medication alone to address symptoms of anxiety and/or depression, with individuals who receive the same medication while also attending psychotherapy/psychological counseling that is fashioned to target symptom-reduction through behavioral and insight-oriented methods, and results consistently reflect overwhelming evidence that medication coupled with psychotherapy/psychological counseling results in statistically significant faster, more thorough, and sustainable symptom reduction.
A Perspective Built Through Decades of Experience
Whether the concern involves a struggling child, the challenges associated with aging, or physical symptoms that may be influenced by emotional stress, counseling can provide an opportunity to better understand what is occurring beneath the surface.
Dr. Woodruff’s experience spans inpatient and outpatient psychiatric treatment settings, private practice work, consultation, and decades of helping individuals and families navigate difficult life circumstances. His approach is grounded in careful listening, thoughtful reflection, practical insight, and respect for each person’s unique life experience.
At A Time To Heal, the goal is not simply symptom reduction, but helping individuals develop a clearer understanding of themselves, their relationships, and the challenges they face so that life can be approached with greater confidence, stability, and peace of mind.
