About James Nole, LMHC, Seattle Therapist Serving Washington State
I began losing my sight to a rare, inherited degenerative retinal condition. The loss pulled me into a deep depression full of fear and desperation, and eventually to a suicide attempt. What followed was my own long stretch of therapy. It taught me to stay with uncertainty and painful feelings, and it showed me that pain, held within the right relationship, can be lived with and even turned toward something meaningful. That experience is why I became a therapist. I went on to earn my master’s degree in psychology from Seattle University’s Existential and Phenomenological Psychology program.
Along the way, I volunteered with the King County Crisis Line, the Washington Warm Line, and Recovery Café, and completed my internship at Catholic Community Services. Much of that work was with people facing crisis, homelessness, and systemic oppression. It taught me how much depends on listening closely and staying present with someone in real pain.
I have seven years of experience as a psychotherapist, six of them in private practice. My training includes:
- Complex trauma and dissociation, through the ISSTD certificate program
- Relational psychodynamic therapy, through the Contemporary Psychodynamic Institute
- PACT couples therapy, Level 2
- Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR), Level 3
- Registered Hypnotherapist in Washington State, with ASCH Certification in Clinical Hypnosis
I see clients in person in Pioneer Square and by telehealth across Washington State.
My approach
Each of us carries our own shape of suffering, formed by our history and the relationships we grew up in. Most of us rarely get a place where that suffering can be spoken plainly and actually understood. I try to make that kind of room.
Living with progressive blindness has taught me, on a very human level, how hard it is to keep moving in the face of heavy loss. Our wounds stay with us, and over time we learn to live with them differently. Trauma does not have to be the end of your story. With the right help, it can become a chrysalis rather than a cage. Viktor Frankl wrote that suffering changes once it finds a meaning, and I’ve found that to be true, both in my own life and in the lives of the people I work with.
Where we are wounded, and where we heal
We live inside a web of relationships, at home, at work, and everywhere in between. The people we love bring us joy, and they also disappoint us, hurt us, and sometimes leave, just as we do to them. Much of the pain people bring to therapy began in relationships, and much of the healing happens in one.
Many people carry their struggles in isolation. Therapy exists, in part, to end that. You don’t have to do this alone.
How I work
My work is grounded in existential and relational psychodynamic therapy, informed by psychoanalytic thinking. I pay attention to the big picture of your life and to the small moments in the room where old patterns show up in real time.
I also draw on current neuroscience. Many trauma responses, like freezing, shutting down, or feeling flooded, are organized in parts of the brain that act faster than conscious thought. Deep Brain Reorienting works directly with those early responses. PACT brings the same understanding to couples. Clinical hypnosis offers another way to reach what talking alone sometimes can’t.
My focus is complex trauma, dissociation, and couples, along with disability and chronic illness. I work with adults, couples, and some teens, and no concern is off-limits here. I shape the work around each person, and around the person you’re still becoming. To me, good therapy is both creative and faithful: open to whatever emerges, and committed to staying with you through it.
Art and creativity
Emotion gives us motion;
art gives us life.
As a musician who is also blind, I know how much it can matter to express yourself through art. Creative work is one of the ways we come to understand ourselves. The same drive that fuels it can also stir up anxiety, depression, self-doubt, and the feeling of being an imposter. Those struggles don’t mean you can’t make something meaningful. When we work with them, they often become part of what gives the work its life.
Learn more about how I can help: trauma and Complex PTSD, DID and dissociation, couples therapy, depression, anxiety, and disability.
