Hi, nice to meet you!
Hello! I want to begin by welcoming you to my very first blog. I thought I would introduce myself and tell you a bit about me and what I hope to accomplish in this forum.
My name is River, and I’ve been a licensed clinical therapist for 25 years. When I began working with clients, I knew that I wanted to focus on relationships and families, but what I didn’t know was that I would end up becoming a trauma specialist. I guess that makes sense in many ways as I have come to understand trauma from both the inside, through my own experience of trauma, and as a therapist treating trauma and learning what works, what doesn’t and what actually creates healing.
I have this theory about how we end up on our life path, and it’s only a theory - I don’t have anything other than my own life experiences to prove it but here goes.
Each of us has a purpose and a path in our lives that we are supposed to follow. Sometimes we know intuitively know what our course is supposed to be, and other times life directs us onto our path. That was how I ended up finding my way into being a specialist with trauma.
When I started out as a baby therapist, I didn’t have a focus on what I was supposed to do. In the beginning, my clients were struggling with self-harm and self-injury, physical, mental and psychological abuse, sexual abuse, eating disorders, and toxic family systems. Because there wasn’t much literature on understanding trauma at the time (early 2000), as a therapist, I had the experience of learning alongside my clients as they were walking through their trauma.
In those beginning years, it was a lot of trial and error to see what helped people move through their trauma, as well as what kept people stuck. I became very fascinated by the idea that people could heal from the things they had gone through and that those traumas intern could be the very same things that gave them strength, wisdom, and perseverance. The challenge was to figure out how to turn some of the most painful experiences people had gone through in their lives into something that did not only help them to grow but even more so helped them thrive.
I’ve learned that people are powerful and resilient. I’ve also learned that our stories don’t have to define us, but often our stories hold us hostage and prisoners to our past. Traditional therapy and training focuses on recapitulating the past, what happened, or feelings about it, and I had begun to notice that the more we focus on the past, the more we continue to experience that pain in the present. In my own life, the stories of my trauma began to hold me captive to a life of searching for the meaning of the psychological abuse that I experienced. It wasn’t until I had gone through some significant life-changing experiences that I started to deconstruct my life, the stories, the feelings, and the beliefs so that I could be free to create my life as I wanted.
As I began to do this for myself, I started incorporating this into the work with my clients. We focused on being in the present, changing the language that we use, and changing how we think about things. Over time I watched my clients, one after another after another, begin not only to heal but break free of the bonds of their past that had held them hostage.
My goal is twofold one that these blogs help you navigate your life by giving you tools, new ways of thinking, different understandings and perspectives so that you can feel the peace and happiness that is available for you. I want to put out into the world what has been given to me so that as I put out material, it is possible someone, somewhere, can gain something to help them through this life.
Another goal of mine, and it’s really a passion project, is to create a training course for therapists to do therapy and counseling differently. Truly, I have been blessed to have some of the most incredible and profound teachers on my journey. They have enabled me to do work with my clients that have become literal alchemy of everything that I’ve learned along the way and my own experience as a client in therapy doing the work.
One of the things I feel very passionate about is that there needs to be better quality therapy accessible and delivered to clients. We have a system that is still keeping people sick. Whether that’s the healthcare system, our tax system, our educational system, etc., all of these systems need to be redefined and reconfigured because they’re no longer working for us. We’ve seen that over the last two years of Covid. It’s been the breakdown of every single system that needs to break in order to be rebuilt.
So, as we begin this journey together, I hope to create something unique and meaningful, add value to your life, and inspire you to keep going on your trip through this life.
All my love,
River
