Miles Chinnachart Poola-or 

Clinical Mental Health Counselling

 

Story

My interest in psychology and human behaviour started long before I ever realised. As a kid, I was drawn to live theatre as a study of human behaviours, and if you can believe it, I wanted to become a musical theatre actor. Human behaviour fascinated me even then, but having struggled through a difficult childhood and teenage years, a career in psychology never felt like something that was actually on the table for me at the time. For years, I found myself trying to make sense of the world through language, whether to understand other people or to understand myself, and that curiosity eventually led me to linguistics. I moved to New York City to study Applied Linguistics at Columbia University, where I started taking psychology classes alongside my coursework. Along the way, I kept encountering people, myself included, who felt lost navigating language, culture, and displacement, unable to find anyone who truly understood the weight of it, and that's what first pointed me toward therapy, this time as a client myself. Toward the end of that degree, I decided to bring together everything I cared about, language, human behaviour, and psychology, and pivoted my career toward psychotherapy, earning a Master's degree in Clinical Mental Health Counselling from Rollins College in Florida, with a concentration in Marriage, Family, and Relationship Therapy.

 

Since then, I've spent over five years and more than 3,000 hours in direct clinical practice across community mental health, university counselling, private practice, and charity settings in the US and UK. I began at the Victim Service Centre of Central Florida, providing long-term trauma-informed counselling to survivors of sexual assault and violent crime, and designing and co-facilitating a therapy group on trauma and intersectionality within the BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ community. From there I moved to New York for individual and couples work, then to London, where for three years I worked as a Suicide Prevention Therapist at James' Place, a charity working exclusively with men in suicidal crisis, alongside equine-assisted psychotherapy at Operation Centaur with clients in recovery from addiction. As a gay, Thai immigrant who has lived and worked across Thailand, the US, and the UK, I bring that lived cross-cultural experience into the room alongside my clinical training. Coming home has meant thinking hard about what needs to shift for this work to actually land here: how to build the language for internal emotional experience with clients where it isn't always readily there, and how to hold space for family, hierarchy, and cultural context in a way that feels genuinely relevant rather than borrowed wholesale from elsewhere.

 

My approach is integrative rather than one-size-fits-all. I'm rooted in person-centred and psychodynamic theory, and I draw flexibly on EMDR, Internal Family Systems, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and Gottman Method tools, among others, depending on what's most useful for the person in front of me. No one is born with a map, a handbook, or an instruction manual for this thing called life, and I don't believe therapy should try to be one either. A good therapist doesn't claim to be the expert on your life; they show up as a torch, a mirror, and a guide. My hope is to offer you a collaborative, non-judgemental space aimed at building mental clarity, self-awareness, and self-regulation, and, in time, self-acceptance, along with the resources, support, and sense of belonging that let you move toward the life you're working toward.

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Related Experience:

• James’ Place Charity, London, UK (Suicide Prevention for men)

• Operation Centaur, London, UK (Equine-assisted Psychotherapy)

• By Repose, NY, USA (Group Private Practice)

• Victim Service Centre of Central Florida, FL, USA (Trauma Therapy)

• Cornell Counselling Clinic Rollins College, FL, USA (College and University Counselling)

• The (LGBTQ+) Centre Orlando, FL, USA (LGBTQ+)

• Aspire Health Partner, Men’s Residential Orange, FL, USA (In-patient addiction)

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Professional Memberships:

• Registered Member (MBACP): British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP)

• Limited Permit: The New York State Education Department, Division of Professional Licensing Services

 

Education:

• M.A. in Clinical Mental Health Counselling, Rollins College, FL, USA

  • Concentration in Marriage, Family, and Relationship Therapy

• M.A. in Applied Linguistics, Teachers College Columbia University, NY, USA

• B.A. in English, summa cum laude, Dhurakij Pundit University, Bangkok, Thailand 

 

Area of Focus/Specializations:

• Depression/Anxiety

• Trauma & PTSD/CPTSD

• Suicide Prevention & Risk Assessment

• Men's Mental Health

• LGBTQIA+

• Identities Work

• Cross-Cultural, Immigrant & Expat Life

• Interracial, Intercultural & Non-Traditional Relationships (Poly, ENM, Open, Etc.)

• Boarding School Syndrome

• Life Transitions

• Group Work & Psychoeducation

 

Trainings

• Equine-Assisted Model for Psychotherapy, Coaching, and Corporate Training (UK)

• Gottman Method Couples Therapy Level 1 (USA)

• EMDR Training (USA)

• Advocacy Core Training (ACT) on Sexual Violence (USA)

• Counseling on Access to Lethal Means (CALM) (USA)

• QPRT Suicide Risk Assessment and Management (USA)

• Equine-Assisted Psychotherapy (EAGALA) (USA)