Seasons Change

Winter snow is never permanent and neither is a summer heatwave. Eventually, there will come a clearing, a reprieve from the unpleasantries, a sign of progress.

Tammy Foster Harban finds comfort knowing that seasons do, in fact, change. Inspired by that belief, the licensed mental health counselor fittingly named her newly opened practice Seasons Change Counseling, confident that her clients’ capacities to heal are just around the corner.

After she began renting the building in November, Foster Harban transformed the former Jasper County Republican Party headquarters into her own private practice, a culmination of more than 16 years of experience in therapy work. Operating her first counseling center at 521 First Ave. E. is a bit of a change for Foster Harban, who described herself as a “gypsy at heart,” a person that freely moved from job to job in her desired fields of psychology and community mental health.

Now that she has her own outpatient therapy clinic to manage, Foster Harban jokingly said she is getting too old to continue bouncing around jobs in crisis counseling, inpatient therapy and trauma-informed care, among others. A physical location she can claim as her own is one way she will force herself to “stick with it” and stay put.

“I need to do this,” Foster Harban said. “It’s been something I’ve wanted to do forever. If I don’t do it now then I’m not going to.”

A nomadic career, intentional or otherwise, has helped Foster Harban develop Seasons Change Counseling by introducing her to several types of patients, environments and therapeutic methods. While the rest of her Newton-raised siblings had ambitions to work for Maytag Corporation, Foster Harban wanted to help people in someone.

Upon earning her bachelor’s degree in psychology from Upper Iowa University, Foster Harban started counseling young sex offenders at Woodward Academy. Knowing full well it would be a difficult undertaking, she intended to only work at the academy for three months; instead, she stayed for three years. Coincidentally, she credited her time at Woodward Academy as the place where she learned the most about therapy.

Attending classes at Drake University lead to a master’s degree in community mental health and eventual job shifts to inpatient therapy, outpatient therapy, a supervisors for an academy in Minnesota and in-home counseling. She then worked full time with kids who were sexually abused, another difficult task for Foster Harban.

She then returned to Drake to earn a certificate in school counseling and became a school counselor for some time. Afterward, she was recruited to join the Des Moines Police Department’s Mobile Crisis team, which she specified was a very fulfilling job that also added a lot of stress. Taking charge of Seasons Change Counseling, she said, has been less stressful than previous duties thus far, which she feels is surprising.

“But I’ve done a lot, and a lot of us (therapists) have,” Foster Harban said. “The nature of people is the same. People want to get help. People want to be better. People want to be happy. That’s the same no matter where you go.”

Although she works with couples and different types of one-on-one sessions at Seasons Change, Foster Harban said she specializes is trauma-type counseling, which she attributes to her wealth of experience working with those who have been sexually abused, as well as sex offenders. She utilizes a therapy technique called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EDMR) to help patients.

“It works on your right brain and your left brain to reprocess bad memories or bad things that happened to you,” Foster Harban said. “When it first came out, they did it on (veterans). They did a brain scan before EDMR and after EDMR and they noticed the colors were different, things were ‘rewired’ and things like that.

“… It changed how people thought. They weren’t triggered anymore, they didn’t have the startle reflex, they could go do things they normally would have been paralyzed to do. So then they tried it with people who had been raped or sexually abused … people that couldn’t be intimate before or couldn’t walk down an alley or couldn’t have a conversation with the opposite sex, they were able to do all of those things and have a happy, fulfilled life.”

She also works with couples on occasion. A “couples camp” is available for

Although Seasons Change Counseling is faith-based, Foster Harban said she has worked enough secular therapy jobs to feel comfortable working a nonreligious therapy session to meet the needs of patients. Ultimately, her passion is to help people by listening and problem solving.

“My passion comes from wanting more from myself and wanting to end my day saying, ‘You know what? I’ve accomplished something,’” Foster Harban said.

Contact Christopher Braunschweig at 641-792-3121 ext. 6560 or cbraunschweig@newtondailynews.com