For more than 20 years, Frank Carter has been aiming to help people through his life, family and business coaching services.
“After 20 years in business, I decided to return to school and get my master’s and Ph.D.,” Carter said of how he ultimately developed his Peaks coaching program.
The program is designed to help clients enhance their personal and professional lives using his proprietary methodology, developed partly while Carter was in school learning about psychology.
Carter, who has a bachelor’s degree in psychology, a master’s in sports counseling and a doctorate in clinical psychology, said one of his goals is to educate prospective clients about the difference between therapy and counseling.
The difference is important to understand as a consumer, he said. Counseling is about guiding people through circumstances and helping them see the various interests and forces defining those circumstances.
Psychotherapy is about eliminating traumas and other demons that emanate from childhood and continue into adulthood.
“There are many counselors out there; there are also people who do psychotherapy,” Carter said. “I want people to know the difference. A lot of people go to counseling when they really need therapy.”
“The process of mental well-being is easier to understand when you look at the brain as a biological computer,” he added. “Like all computers, the brain runs on a genetic and experiential program. The purpose of therapy is to reprogram the original program. The challenge is that the brain doesn’t want to change because it’s not supposed to change after childhood.”
The goal of therapy is to eliminate the memories of trauma and the subsequent pains accumulated over a lifetime by reworking the programs in the brain so you experience a different outcome from your habitual past.
Talking and processing feelings does relieve the accumulated and unexpressed pain and does make a person feel better, but it does not sufficiently alter future behaviors enough to eliminate the habitual repetition of the past.
“At the core of the therapy process is the need to feel and re-experience your real feelings which reside deep in memory and challenge the natural tendency to justify and cover up those deeper feelings by thinking or ruminating about what bothers you without acquiring and rehearsing new information to alter future behavior,” Carter said.
He said it’s also important to understand the difference between men and women.
“Men tend to be very black and white in their approach to life’s struggles,” he said. “They tend to be very resistant to any demands for flexibility and tolerance in themselves or others.
“Women tend to function in the gray area of individual and social life, which gives them greater flexibility for the challenges of social survival and to exercise tolerance with both new and old circumstances that can be universally acknowledged to be destructive and counter to the woman’s as well as the family’s well-being.”
Carter said his goal is to continue “helping as many people as I can until I’m done.”
For more information, visit drfrankcarter.com or call (858) 454-2828.
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