Hello, I’m Ralph Porter
Everyone is capable of a healthy relationship with themselves and the people around them. Sometimes we get in our own way.
My wife and I live in beautiful Boerne, Texas.
My counseling approach is grounded in Gestalt therapy, which I have trained in formally. It is one of the best ways I know to deepen your sense of yourself and of how you meet the world in the present moment. That awareness is what makes choice possible, and choices tend to appear where you had not thought there were any.
I am a Licensed Professional Counselor, a Licensed Chemical Dependency Counselor, and a National Certified Counselor.
- Texas LPC No. 82166
- Texas LCDC No. 15067
How I work
I am a licensed professional counselor and I practise Gestalt therapy. In plain terms: we work with what is happening now, as it happens, instead of spending the hour analysing your past from a safe distance.
Mostly it is a conversation, though a more attentive one than usual. I notice what shifts as you talk — where your attention goes, what arrives just before something difficult, the joke that turns up at the hard moment — and I say so, and ask what you make of it. You are the authority on your own experience. If I have it wrong, tell me.
What that builds is awareness, and awareness is not the warm-up to the work. It is very largely the work. Choices that looked unavailable tend to become available once you can see plainly what you are doing and what it is costing you.
If you have seen the old films
If you look up Gestalt therapy, you will probably find footage of Fritz Perls in the late 1960s: a man in a jumpsuit at Esalen, working with someone in an empty chair in front of an audience. It is arresting, it is most of what the internet remembers, and it is not what this is.
Perls died in 1970. The people who had trained with him spent the following fifty years replacing that confrontational hot-seat performance with something dialogic — two people in a room, working together, with the relationship between them treated as part of the method rather than a distraction from it. Bob Resnick, trained and certified by Perls himself, spent a career on exactly that correction, and it is the contemporary relational tradition I trained in.
So the footage is a historical document rather than a description of a session. If you want the long version of who those two men were, both are written up here.
I came to this as a client
Not as a student of it first, and not out of academic interest. I went in for reasons I would have described differently at the time, and what Gestalt therapy did was show me a few things I had been carefully not looking at — without talking me out of any of them, and without handing me a plan for self-improvement. That was not what I had expected therapy to be, and it is largely why I went on to train in it.
Sitting on the other side of it since then, the thing that still surprises me is how much becomes available to people once they stop managing themselves. Not through insight arriving in a flash, usually. More often it is someone noticing, out loud and for the first time, what they actually do — and hearing it land.
That is the part I would not want to stop doing. People are more resourceful than they give themselves credit for, and most of what I do is get out of the way of that while paying close attention.
Who I work with
I work with adults, individually and as couples. The concerns that come up most often are anxiety and the sense of being permanently braced for something; relationships that have gone quiet or gone sharp; addiction, and the harder-than-advertised years that follow stopping; depression; grief, including losses other people expect you to be over by now; anger, and what sits underneath it; and the stretches where a life changes shape — a job, a marriage, a diagnosis, or the slow realisation that you no longer want what you organised everything around.
Some people arrive with one clear thing and some arrive unable to name it at all. Both are workable. You do not need a diagnosis, and you do not need to have worked out what the real problem is before we start — that is often the first thing we do together.
What I will not do is pretend to be the right person for everything. If what you need sits outside what I do well, I would rather say so early and help you find someone better placed than take the appointment.
I talk like a person
Which means no jargon, no reflecting your sentences back at you with the ends turned up, and no announcing what your behaviour means. When I notice something — where your attention went, the thing you skipped over, the joke that arrived at the hard moment — I say so, and then ask what you make of it. You are the one who knows.
You can disagree with me. I would rather be corrected than politely humoured, and being wrong out loud is often where the useful part starts. If something I say lands badly, say that too.
I do not fill every silence. Some of the most useful moments in a session are the ones where neither of us says anything for a while, and I have learned not to rescue those. I also will not tell you something is fine when it isn’t.
Now and then I will push — invite you to stay with something you would rather move past. You can always decline, and declining is not a failure; noticing that you want to move past it is already the work.
What I want for you
I do not have a plan for the person you ought to become. That is deliberate rather than modest. When a therapist decides what a good outcome looks like, the client usually senses it and starts producing it, and what you talk yourself into wanting under that kind of pressure tends not to survive contact with a Tuesday afternoon.
What I do want is narrower and harder to fake: that you get a clear, unhurried look at what you actually do, what it costs you, and what you want — including the wants that are inconvenient. Choice follows from that far more reliably than it follows from a plan. Most of the things people describe as impossible turn out to be things they had not yet let themselves look at directly.
The specific goals are yours to name, in your own words, early on and out loud. We come back to them, and you are allowed to change them. Six weeks in you will usually be able to see the situation better than you could on the first day, and it would be strange to hold you to a target set by someone with less information.
And I would rather you did not need me indefinitely. A good ending is not that everything has been resolved — it’s that you can do this for yourself well enough that paying me to help feels unnecessary.
