My mother, maternal and paternal grandmothers all lived with autoimmune diseases, with my paternal grandmother passing away due to complications from her illness. I was my mother’s primary caregiver for the year and a half before she passed away from her fight with cancer. So when at 25, I started having strange and unexplainable symptoms, and then at 27, living bedridden with no diagnosis, I began to try and put the pieces together for myself. I found no support from the allopathic medical community, which left me confused, depressed, and alone. So, I started searching for answers, but it wasn’t until the first year of my master’s program that the pieces started to fall into place.

As I sat in my childhood development class, a slide came up on the screen. It was about a study developed in the’ 90s’ called the Adverse Childhood Experiences Survey. It was a 10 question survey about adversity in childhood. The study showed that as adversity increased, the incidents of chronic mental and physical health conditions rose drastically. I was looking around the class, amazed. How did people know this stuff, and we weren’t shouting it from the rooftops? It seemed clear that the most significant health crisis facing America was trauma and adversity.

I come from a family that has struggled with substance abuse and mental health struggles, and I am now a person in long-term substance abuse recovery. As I experienced mental health struggles, drug addiction, grief, and numerous family crises, I was being impacted and shaped in ways that I was unaware of. Coming full circle, I know that these experiences shaped my desire to pursue psychotherapy and integrative mental health and a drive to provide more people with real healing options.

These experiences shaped me in so many ways, some that I have come to know and some that are still being revealed. My first experience with integrative and functional health was when my mother was diagnosed with cancer. I saw the way that she was suffering as a result of her treatments and the medical system at large. That launched me into my first investigative effort to try and find her relief.

Through integrative and naturopathic medicine, I saw her get relief from pain and manage her symptoms for the first time. My experiences with my mother and later trying to find my own diagnosis influenced how I work with clients and see the body and health vs. disease.

I started focusing on integrative health during the second year of my counseling master’s program. I obtained a certificate as an integrative nutrition health coach and began looking for ways to weave what I had learned into my clinical work.

By my second year as a therapist, I opened my private practice focusing specifically on integrative health and mental health nutrition. I learned that seeing clients from a whole-person perspective led to real and sustainable changes that clients had not experienced in the traditional medical model.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)

Somatic Experiencing

Mindfulness

Internal Family Systems

Mental Health Nutrition

Most of my clients have been very receptive to an integrative approach, particularly when I explain how our mental and physical health is connected. My favorite example for clients is that 90% of our serotonin is produced in the gut and not in the brain. I can use the best therapeutic approaches, but if you have poor gut health, you will have poor mental health. This example really resonates with people. Once we begin adding in integrative modalities and my clients start seeing results, it becomes very natural to utilize in session and very rewarding as a practitioner.

Unfortunately, there is still a pretty big divide between the mental health and medical communities. While I have come across some providers who are interested and receptive to an integrative model, a large portion of “the old guard” is still not interested in hearing about these alternative approaches.

Luckily, as adjunct faculty at the Arizona Trauma Institute, I have met large numbers of providers that take my courses who are interested and hungry for more information and training on integrative approaches to psychotherapy.