About Michael

I’m Michael Civile, a licensed mental health counselor in Wenatchee, Washington.

I work with adults and couples who are trying to understand why the same problems keep showing up—despite insight, effort, good intentions, or repeated attempts to change.

Sometimes that looks like anxiety that won’t settle down. Sometimes it is a marriage caught in the same argument over and over. Sometimes it is trauma that still seems to live in the body long after the danger has passed. Sometimes it is anger, avoidance, pornography, alcohol, compulsive behavior, shame, or a persistent sense that something is wrong even when life looks fine from the outside.

I’m interested in what is happening now, but also in what lies underneath it.

Therapy with me is usually a mix of paying close attention to patterns, understanding where they came from, noticing what happens in the present, and figuring out what actually needs to change. I don’t think insight by itself is enough. But I also don’t think lasting change usually comes from collecting more coping skills while leaving the deeper problem untouched.

We may talk about your history, your relationships, the ways you learned to protect yourself, what you avoid, what you long for, what makes you angry, and what happens between us in the room. At other times the work may be much more practical: preparing for a difficult conversation, learning how to regulate your nervous system, repairing trust after betrayal, interrupting a compulsive pattern, or working directly with traumatic memories.

I use psychodynamic therapy, EMDR, and Gottman Method Couples Therapy, depending on what the situation calls for. I have completed Level 3 training in the Gottman Method and advanced training in EMDR.

Couples Therapy

Couples usually don’t come to therapy because they lack information about relationships. Most already know they should communicate better, listen more carefully, spend more time together, or stop saying things they regret.

The problem is that once a relationship gets activated, knowing what to do and actually being able to do it can become two very different things.

I work with couples dealing with chronic conflict, emotional distance, resentment, betrayal, loss of trust, sexual disconnection, and the feeling of becoming roommates rather than partners.

Couples therapy involves learning to recognize the cycle you are caught in, understand what each person is protecting or reacting to, repair injuries that have accumulated over time, and begin interacting differently when things get hard.

Trauma and EMDR

Trauma is not always experienced as a vivid memory of something terrible that happened.

It can show up as a body that stays on alert, an inability to relax, shame that seems disproportionate to the present, emotional numbness, panic, anger, nightmares, avoidance, or reactions that make sense intellectually but still feel impossible to control.

EMDR can help the brain process experiences that have remained emotionally unfinished. I use it alongside relational and psychodynamic work, rather than treating trauma as something that can always be reduced to a protocol.

Individual Therapy

A lot of people who come to see me are functioning reasonably well.

They have jobs. Families. Responsibilities. People who depend on them.

And something still isn’t working.

You may understand your problem intellectually and still find yourself repeating it. You may be successful in some parts of life and feel strangely powerless in others. You may have spent years trying to suppress anxiety, anger, sadness, sexual behavior, drinking, or some other pattern without really understanding what keeps driving it.

That is often where the work becomes interesting.

Therapy can become a place to examine your life with enough honesty and curiosity that your patterns begin to make sense. Once something makes sense, you have a better chance of responding to it deliberately instead of automatically.

Why “Carrying the Fire”?

The name comes from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

In the novel, carrying the fire means holding onto something human and good in a world that can become brutal, frightening, and disorienting.

I like the image because therapy is not ultimately about becoming endlessly comfortable or eliminating every painful emotion.

It is about learning how to live truthfully in the presence of difficulty.

It is about becoming more capable of love, responsibility, courage, grief, repair, restraint, and hope.

Sometimes the work is helping someone find that fire again.

Sometimes it is protecting it.

Sometimes it is figuring out what keeps putting it out.

A Little About Me

Outside the therapy room, I’m a husband and father of three. I enjoy reading, theology, psychology, philosophy, lifting weights, hiking, making coffee, playing guitar, brewing beer, baking sourdough, gardening, and spending time with my family.

I am comfortable working with questions of faith and spirituality when they are important to a client. I also work with people whose beliefs are very different from mine, and I do not see therapy as a place to impose a worldview.

If you are looking for therapy that is thoughtful, relational, practical when it needs to be, and willing to go beneath the surface, we may work well together.

You are welcome to reach out and tell me a little about what brings you to therapy. We can decide from there whether I seem like a good fit.