Dylan Haas
I come to counseling later in life. After 20+ years toiling in corporate America as an engineer in the semiconductor industry, I am intimately familiar with the feelings of isolation, redundancy and despair that accompany trading ones autonomy for the “golden handcuffs” of precarious financial security.
I dedicated years of my life to academic achievement in the “hard” sciences of Physics and Applied Mathematics, ultimately attaining both a MS and PhD in Engineering, benchmarks that buoyed my pride and encouraged the type of intellectual elitism that corrupted my emotional and spiritual balance; I spent years forcing my emotional intelligence to the background while I embraced the caricature of the intellectual elite.
Eventually the existential distress of this imbalance became too much. I made the significant change to focus on mental health counseling – on helping others find peace and stability within their lives.
I specialize in working with professional people, often men, who feel stuck in a career about which they have no passion, especially those floundering in a corporate existence; uncomfortable in a family and home life that is dissatisfying – feeling trapped by the socioeconomic responsibilities they chose to pursue when they were too young and inexperienced to be setting down permanent life-tracks, tracks that now feel more like ruts from which there is no escape.
The clients I work with are intimately familiar with the existential anxieties of modern life: they have a day-after-day experience of demoralization and hopelessness, the natural consequence of compromising their passions and interests for the obligations of family, religion, career, etc; they find themselves leading a life devoid of any soulful purpose or meaning; they are shut off emotionally – from their family, from their loved ones. From themselves.
My mission is to help these people achieve balance within their lives.
My focus is to help my clients integrate their inner lives – the way they view themselves internally, through their hopes, their dreams, their aspirations – with their “outer” life, the external reality of who they are and how they are perceived by others within the life they actually lead, defined by the compromises they’ve made, by the regrets they carry which have led them to the life in which they now find themselves living.
I approach my work with clients from an existential humanistic lens, with an emphasis on using an ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) approach towards addressing my clients experiences of existential anxieties and feelings of emptiness and despair. Through a personalized approach centered on self-evaluation, self-exploration, and the cultivation of self-awareness, I help men (re)discover a sense of equilibrium within themselves, a harmonious integration of their core masculinity with the vulnerability that so many of us have been raised to ignore, down-play and repress. I help men discover and develop their inner strength and serenity in an effort to recognize and embrace the emotional sensitivity they carry within – always with an eye toward alignment with their core values and personal ethics. Together, we work towards the achievement of a truly integrated existence, where the inner self resonates authentically with the outer world, fostering a renewed sense of purpose and meaning in their lives.
I also focus on clients experiencing the anxiety of transitioning out of a restrictive and domineering faith, hoping to embrace a more secular way of life - with an emphasis on ex-LDS.
