Meet James
Fifty years asking the same question.
What is this all for? I started asking at nineteen and never really stopped. Forty-five years later it is still the question underneath most of the work I do.
James Carl Revels, MA, LCMHC
A dormitory, a philosophy degree, and a life that changed direction.
I was nineteen, living in the athletic dormitory at the University of Florida and headed toward professional football, when I had an experience I have spent the rest of my life trying to understand. It redirected everything. I changed my major to philosophy, added psychology and religion, and let go of a path most people would have kept.
That decision took me to San Francisco for graduate study and an MA in humanistic psychology, straight into the middle of the Human Potential Movement: personal growth work and Eastern contemplative traditions, both of them everywhere at once. Fifty years on, that material still shapes how I sit with people.
Forty-five years, and not one of them wasted.
I have served developmentally disabled adults and people living with traumatic brain injuries. I have worked with teenagers in group homes and with children and families in community-based services. I spent ten years supporting military service members and their families stationed around the world, and two years inside a correctional institution.
None of that was a detour. Every one of those rooms taught me something about what people carry and what actually helps. It is why I can usually tell, fairly early, whether the thing in front of us is the thing we should be working on.
Why I came back.
I took two years away for my own health. What I found in that time is that I still want to do this work, not all of it, and not at the pace I once did, but the part that matters most to me.
I want to sit with people who have accomplished a great deal and are asking what it was for. I want to teach the practices that have carried me. And I want to keep writing, which I have done for over fifty years across poetry, psychology and philosophy.
If that sounds like the conversation you have been looking for, I would like to hear from you.
Background
Credentials
- License
- Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor, North Carolina · #2426
- Education
- MA, Humanistic Psychology · BA, Philosophy
- Training
- Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) · Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)
- Modalities
- Cognitive behavioral · Psychodynamic · Somatic · Mindfulness-based · Humanistic and existential
- In practice
- Forty-five years
- Delivery
- Secure telehealth, North Carolina
When you are ready, I am here.
A free, confidential 15 to 20 minute conversation. No pressure and no paperwork, just a chance to hear each other out.