Marcus Walton

I believe that every person has their own inner healing intelligence that is fully integrated, body, mind, and spirit, and that the work of psychotherapy is in unlocking and utilizing that intelligence. My job as a therapist is to honor, channel, and foster the growth of this intelligence in you, the client, who serves as the ultimate expert on the meaning and direction of your own experience.

I work with teens, adults, and elders, individuals and couples experiencing a variety of issues. Some common ones include: depression, anxiety, grief and loss, stress, trauma, PTSD and CPTSD, sexual issues, intimacy issues, and communication challenges. I also have a special interest in working with members of the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, and years of experience living and working with people in the neurodivergent community. I work from a wellness orientation to therapy that emphasizes the strengths, joys, gifts, and resources available to each client, using these to work collaboratively towards short or long term goals. I have completed training in ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) and Mindfulness practice. From this theory and practice, we might consider several questions together as particularly illuminating: how can I have what I want; how can I want what I have; and what does it mean for me to be fully alive in this moment? I believe that desire is an important source of vitality and awake-ness that can be grown within a context of an abiding contentment and that these are inherently channelable, achievable and often simply discoverable. I’m also trained in EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) therapy, an evidence-based treatment for trauma/PTSD/CPTSD, and have an interest in Internal Family Systems therapy.

I have a special interest in people working with legacies of religious trauma, recovery from Purity Culture, and those struggling to hold on to or reinvent their faith/spiritual beliefs in the wake of negative religious experiences and ensuing spiritual de/reconstruction. I’m deeply informed by the Christian and Buddhist traditions and knowledgeable about other faiths and ready to constructively integrate whatever parts of spiritual experience feel important to you into our work together.

I’m a Queer, white, cisgender male who comes from a working class family in the South, and am recovering from Evangelical Fundamentalist religion. I currently live in an intentional community of people with and without disabilities living together, and am thriving within the beloved community I find therein. I spend my free time exploring the Eno River and Ellerbee Creek parks of Durham, writing and playing music, and befriending other people’s dogs.