Mettle Health

The Role
The Companion Practitioner serves as a compassionate guide and translator for people navigating the complex, often fragmented terrain of serious illness, grief, and the end of life. This role reduces unnecessary suffering by providing holistic accompaniment-integrating practical support, relational connection, aesthetic insight, and existential exploration-providing a safe space for clients to fall apart and rebuild.
Responsibility 1: Longitudinal Accompaniment

• Like a river guide reading a map, the Companion Practitioner will utilize the Care Plan designed in the Initial Consultation to explore and join with the dynamic realities of client's story over time, expecting to adjust course, as needed, in response to changing needs across practical, relational, aesthetic and existential domains.
• Join clients in building an ongoing supportive relationship, creating a safe container for being with and witnessing all that is evolving in their lives.
• Provide on-going "Medical Sense-Making" and practical navigation support, helping clients decode medical jargon, organize logistics, and restore cognitive bandwidth so they can focus on what matters most.
• Facilitate identifying and accessing "aesthetic resources"-sources of beauty, nature, or ritual-that help clients maintain a sense of aliveness and regulation outside of clinical appointments .

Responsibility 2: Relational Practice & "Mettle Stance"

• Embody the "Mettle Stance" by positioning yourself as a companion, not an expert; practicing deep listening, witnessing, and co-regulation to create a safe relational container where "falling apart" is permitted .
• Engage in continuous "praxis" (reflection and action) by attending to your own self-awareness and emotional regulation, ensuring you remain a grounded partner in care.
• Collaborate with the care team to refine and grow Mettle's offerings (extending to content and community) contributing to the evolution of Mettle's methods through case consultation and shared wisdom.

The Ideal Candidate
We are looking for a practitioner who views care as an "exquisite craft"-a practice that blends expertise with deep humanity. You are someone who can hold space for the unfixable while skillfully identifying what can be stabilized. You are comfortable walking alongside clients in the "long middle" of illness, bringing a presence that is grounded, curious, and deeply attuned. You value being an "anchor" over being a "fixer" and are committed to the practice of accompaniment as a transformative act.
Details:

• Location: Remote with occasional travel.
• Hourly rate:
• Paid Time Off: Three weeks paid time off annually, plus nine paid holidays
• Benefits: We offer an ICHRA for health, vision, and dental benefits.

Requirements
Qualifications & Attributes

• Training & Experience: Formative time, 5+ years (professional and/or lived experience) in/with the health care system (allopathic and/or alternative; including medical, nursing, community health professional, and/or psycho-social-spiritual care modalities, expressive arts therapies, death doula, patient care advocate, etc.) providing care with intersectional awareness of systems, interdisciplinary models of communication, and role of socioeconomic and cultural factors impacting access to equitable, person-centered, and/or affordable care.Additional experience in palliative care, hospice, trauma, oncology is preferred.
• Training and/or depth of lived experience which has provided a framework in which to offer appropriate emotional and existential support that is not licensed mental health care (e.g. chaplain training, life coach certification, death doula training, crisis hotline/peer support, grief counseling).
• Core Competencies:
• Narrative: Ability to hear, synthesize, and honor complex life stories.
• Medical Accompaniment: Without pretending medical expertise, demonstrate skill in decoding medical concepts, respond to medical concerns (including prognosis and illness trajectory) in the moment, and mirror back client experience in ways that support safety, clarity, validation, and values-clarification.
• Grief Literacy: Knowledge and skill with companioning grief without effort to fix or resolve
• Virtual Presence: Comfort creating intimacy and safety via video platforms.
• Embodied practice (draft 2/15/26): A reliable and expanding toolkit of embodied/somatic and/or creative expression and/or meditative practices that support present-oriented awareness, relationship to the senses, and the building of safe containers for expression of multi-dimensional pain across a telehealth platform
• Healthy Risk-Taking: Identifying and naming possible healthy risks available in the experience of giving and receiving care. Explicitly exposing the possible healthy risks while accessing one's own self-awareness around the idea of the "just right challenge".
• Perspective-Taking: Ability to approach or join with another in their respective worldview in order to approach their inquiry, to the best of anyone's ability, from inside that worldview; willingness to take diverse perspectives, learn from and support each client's own beliefs, values, life philosophy, culture(s) and/or spiritual/religious commitments

Personal Attributes:

• High tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity
• Deep capacity for empathy without "fixing"
• Commitment to culturally responsive care
• Boundaried ability to provide ethical and self-aware accompaniment that is cognizant of power differentials despite the intention to approach client support as a companion, not an expert.
• Commitment to honor client dignity and autonomy in relationship to their care decisions
• Respect for one's own personal and professional limits with the ready capacity to ask for supervisory support, collaborate with other Mettle Health counselors, and/or refer out.

Benefits
Who We Are
At Mettle, the work begins where the clinic ends: helping families navigate what to say to their children, supporting partners when the ground has shifted, and guiding individuals through the decision of whether to keep working or how to let go. This role is about supporting people as they learn to be themselves when their bodies become unfamiliar and the future becomes uncertain. It is about the art of grieving and the practice of staying alive to the life that remains.
Mettle is comprised of practitioners who have spent years in the territory of serious illness, grief, and dying. The team navigates the complexity of the medical system and translates clinical language into actionable clarity, helping people sort through decisions that feel impossible. Beyond logistics, Mettle practitioners are skilled at sitting with people in uncertainty, making room for the relationships, emotions, and existential questions that the healthcare system cannot make time for. This is "whole-life care"-an approach that honors the person, not just the diagnosis.
Our Values:

• Candor: Truth with kindness and courage.
• Relationship: We are interdependent and how we connect matters.
• Fidelity: Loyalty to the mission, not ego or expedience.
• Agency: Supporting people's journeys without claiming to know what's best.