The Counter Complex is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit with a small team, created to serve people seeking depth, integration, and honest relationship outside of models that feel inaccessible, overly clinical, or disconnected from lived experience.

We are not licensed therapists. We are not gurus. We do not claim special status or superiority.

We are human beings who have lived through instability, trauma, spiritual rupture, and recovery, and who now work to create containers where others can meet themselves with honesty, safety, and support.

Our work is relational, trauma-aware, and grounded in lived experience rather than hierarchy or ideology.

We have witnessed a widening gap between what people need and what is available.

For many, meaningful support is locked behind financial barriers, professional gatekeeping, or systems that privilege credentials over contact. While licensing and formal education have value, they can also become constrictive and elitist, reinforcing models that are no longer meeting the moment we are in.

The Counter Complex exists to offer another way.

Not a replacement for therapy or medicine, but a complementary space where people can engage spiritual, emotional, and instinctual life in community, without performance, bypass, or exclusion.

We believe healing happens in relationship, not isolation, and that many of our wounds were shaped in relational environments that must now be met relationally.

Our authority does not come from titles. It comes from years of direct engagement with recovery, trauma, spiritual inquiry, group facilitation, and integration work.

We have spent years inside recovery spaces, spiritual communities, dreamwork circles, men’s and women’s groups, and non ordinary states of consciousness. We have also learned where these spaces fall short, and where people are often left without support once the experience ends.

The Counter Complex was formed in response to those gaps.

This work is grounded in over four years of study and practice with Michael Walker, founder of Integrative Self Analysis.

Tyler and Ashley Friesen have apprenticed in this approach through ongoing mentorship, facilitation, and direct application in group and relational settings.

Integrative Self Analysis weaves depth psychology, somatic awareness, spiritual tradition, and trauma informed practice, with a particular emphasis on dreams as symbolic communications from the instinctual layers of the psyche.

ISA is not a belief system. It is a working map that helps orient the relationship between instinct, ego, and soul, allowing suppressed material to be integrated rather than acted out or bypassed.

We have also spent over twelve years in direct relationship with non ordinary states of consciousness, including extensive experience with psychedelic medicines.

These experiences can temporarily loosen rigid personality structures, allowing profound insight, energy, and perception to emerge. Without integration, however, this expansion can lead to confusion, dissociation, identity disruption, or the externalization of power.

Our current orientation is not toward seeking peak experience, but toward grounding, integration, and harm reduction.

We work to help people stabilize after powerful experiences, translate insight into daily life, and avoid the common traps of inflation, fragmentation, or spiritual bypass.

This work is approached with humility, caution, and respect for both the potential and the risks involved.

Tyler Friesen is a co founder of The Counter Complex.

He was born in Fresno and is an artist, musician, podcaster, family man, and spiritual autodidact. His early life was marked by addiction, neurosis, unstable relationships, and periods of homelessness.

Following a series of powerful spiritual and near death experiences, along with sustained physical and psychological recovery, Tyler committed his life to understanding the forces that shape human behavior, suffering, and transformation.

He has worked extensively in recovery spaces and spiritual communities, while also recognizing the limitations within many existing models. He believes we are living in a pivotal moment in our collective evolution, one that requires honesty, maturity, and shared responsibility.

Alongside his family, Tyler works in the energy sector while continuing to devote his life to music, men’s work, dreamwork, and accessible spiritual inquiry.

Ashley Friesen is a co founder of The Counter Complex.

She was raised in a highly restrictive religious environment that functioned as a cult, resulting in deep spiritual and psychological trauma. Her path back to spirit required dismantling inherited belief systems and rebuilding meaning through lived experience rather than doctrine.

Ashley’s journey has also included life threatening illness, from which she has recovered, further deepening her understanding of the body, resilience, and the necessity of integration.

Her work is grounded, intuitive, and relational, with a deep sensitivity to the ways trauma, belief, and identity intersect, particularly for women navigating recovery from control, self abandonment, or spiritual harm.