The Upside of Bipolar: Conversations on the Road to Wellness

EP 83: Symptoms Aren’t the Problem: Janey Nelson on Trauma, Triggers, and Real Healing

• Michelle Baughman Reittinger

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We talk with trauma therapist Janey Nelson about why symptoms are not proof you’re broken and how healing can happen when we stop judging emotions and start getting curious about their roots. We dig into Accelerated Resolution Therapy and Critical Memory Integration as practical tools to reduce triggers, resolve trauma responses, and rebuild safety in the body and in relationships.
• Janey’s path into therapy through foster parenting, cancer, and building Healthier U Counseling Center
• What ART is and how bilateral stimulation can reduce sensations and emotions tied to trauma
• Why ART can feel faster and less destabilizing than EMDR for some people
• How CMI traces today’s triggers back to core childhood wounds and unmet needs
• A firefighter example of anger dissolving after connecting with a younger self
• Why diagnosis and symptom labels can kill curiosity and slow recovery
• How CMI can work in groups and retreats to reduce isolation and increase hope
• Why talk therapy alone can keep you stuck in the “logic brain”
• The clinic philosophy of safety, peace, and trauma proficient care across modalities
• How strong intake questions about trauma, sleep, diet, and story reveal the real problem
• Boundaries explained as internal vs external and why boundaries are not rules
• How we decide when individual work supports couples work and vice versa
• Tips for finding best practice trauma treatment and researching modalities safely

LINKS:

INSTAGRAM: healthieryoucc

FACEBOOK: Healthier You

WEBSITE: www.healthieryouc.com

BIO:

 Janey is the owner and Clinical Director of Healthier You Counseling Center and has been a therapist for about 20 years. In 2024, she trained in Critical Memory Integration (CMI) and is on the CMI Training Leadership team. Janey was one of the first Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART) practitioners in Utah, being trained in 2017 and master trained in 2019.

One of her passions is helping others discover their best selves. She does this by creating healthy relationships with clients in individual, marriage, family, and group therapy. Janey helps facilitate empowerment retreats for women and couples. Due to marriage and family being so important to her, she runs Gottman and Layers of Love relationship groups. Additionally, Janey facilitates other groups as the need arises. One of the things she is working on for the CMI Team is to develop CMI for groups.

Her greatest beliefs is that it is important to love everyone, no matter the circumstances. She shows love by practicing kindness, which she believes is honest, assertive, respectful, and loving. It is this belief that helps Janey connect with her clients and develop the bonds of trust that allow them to grow.

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You Are Not Broken

SPEAKER_01

You are not broken. No matter what you've been told, no matter how you feel, you are not broken. And there is you can kill. You can kill.

Meet Janie Nelson And Her Work

SPEAKER_00

Welcome to the Upside of Bipolar, where we uncover the true sources of bipolar symptoms and share proven tools for recovery. I'm your host, Michelle Reitinger, number one international best-selling author of the Upside of Bipolar Seven Steps to Heal Your Disorder. In this podcast, I bring you solo insights from my journey and guest interviews with leading researchers and experts. Join us to transform chaos into hope and reclaim your life. Let's heal together. Welcome to the Upside of Bipolar. I am your host, Michelle Reitinger, and I have a fantastic guest today. I'm so excited to introduce Janie Nelson to you. Janie is the owner and clinical director of Healthier U Counseling Center and has been a therapist for about 20 years. In 2024, she trained in critical memory integration, CMI, and is on the CMI training leadership team. Janie was one of the first accelerated resolution therapy practitioners in Utah, being trained in 2017 and master trained in 2019. One of her passions is helping others discover their best selves. She does this by creating healthy relationships with clients in individual marriage, family, and group therapy. Janie helps facilitate empowerment retreats for women and couples. Due to marriage and family being so important to her, she runs Gottman and Layers of Love Relationship Groups. Additionally, Janie facilitates other groups as need arises. One of the things she is working on for the CMI team is developing CMI for groups. Her greatest belief is that it is important to love everyone, no matter the circumstances. She shows love by practicing kindness, which she believes is honest, assertive, respectful, and loving. It is this belief that helps Janie connect with her clients and develop bonds of trust that allow them to grow. To add to Janie's professional experience, she is a wife, mother, grandmother, and great grandmother. She has was a foster parent for more than 22 years. And during that time, she was awarded Utah's Child Advocate of the Year. Janie loves to cook, enjoys nature, quilting, jewelry making, stained glass, her new hobby, and a man and many other hobbies. She finds peace as she creates. Janie practices mindfulness daily in each of these activities, and they keep her grounded and in touch with herself. Welcome, Jamie. I'm so excited for this conversation today.

SPEAKER_01

That's kind of fun. That's fun to hear that introduction again. I haven't read it for a minute.

Janie’s Story From Foster Care

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, it's it's you're very well rounded, and I'm super excited to dig into what you do. So thank you so much for coming on today. So we always start with your story. So will you please share your story with our audience?

SPEAKER_01

Sure. My story goes back many years. I was five when I knew my job was to help others. But uh five, you don't know what that means, right? And so I always try to do things. I was the friend that would show up and help with that. I helped my siblings a lot. I worked with my mom and dad, worked in my dad's office for a long time, but I don't know what help bothers me. So when I was young, got married at 18, started raising kids. My husband said, You can't work outside the home. I said, Okay, so I became a foster parent and I took the structured kids, the kids who were one step away from being in residence. I did that for quite a few years. Well, I was about 40. My own children were struggling. My youngest and I was talking to God one day and he said, Go to school, and I said no. And he said, Go to school, and I said no. And he said, Go to school, and I said, Okay. And I went to college and I did zero college to my master's in six years exactly. And during that time I had cancer twice, but I still completed it in six years and just started doing the therapy thing. Well, I get a little bit older and I've worked with residential. I worked with my best friend for a while, and I was talking to God and he said, open a practice. I was almost 60. I'm thinking, why am I gonna open a practice? So I said no, and he said, open a practice, and I said no, and he said, open a practice, and I said, Okay, which is how healthier you came about. So that's that's kind of the story that has gotten me to this point. And that's been Healthier You has been a journey in and of itself, a beautiful journey, one that I love and I'm grateful to be part of.

What ART Is And Why It’s Fast

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I I was so impressed when I looked at your clinic. I was looking at the website online, and you have some incredible practitioners there. And there's such a diversity of modalities, too, that I haven't seen. I'm sure that I'm I'm not saying that there aren't other clinics out there, but I've never seen a clinic with the breadth of modality experience that you have with your practitioners. And one, I I want to talk to you about the two that you specialize in. So the ART, accelerated resolution therapy. We have had one practitioner on before, but I'd like to hear your introduction to what ART is and how it facilitates healing. And then I want to explore the critical memory integration because I have never had a practitioner on that does that. And you've got not just yourself, but you've got others in your clinic that practice that as well.

SPEAKER_01

So our clinic is trauma proficient. So a lot of clinics are trauma-informed, right? But we are all of us are in best practices of trauma. So back in 2017, I cook for fun and I was asked to cook at a retreat with veterans. And so I'm just in the kitchen doing my thing, and they all, where do men hang out? In the kitchen with the food. And every one of them talked to me about how ART had changed their life. So I went home to my best friend and I said, Okay, we're going to, I'm gonna go learn this skill. She said, Okay, and we went and we were trained in ART. And and what it is for me, a trauma is not what happens to you. Trauma is how you think and feel about it. So ART, when you get trained in it, what you find is that we're reducing the emotions and sensations around the trauma. Well, trauma is now just a fact. It's nothing more than a fact. Um, this happened to me at this time. ART is so powerful, we don't use it before court case. So if a victim goes in and they just say, This happened to me, it's a fact and there's no emotion, juries don't believe them. Right. So we can't remove the emotion right before a court case. But some of the most powerful experiences is helping someone I work a lot with police and fire, watching them walk out of here with a trauma they've carried for years and now it's not a big deal. We're talking 45 minutes to an hour and 15 minutes.

SPEAKER_00

That's it. So how does that how does that modality work? Can you can you explain? So like I don't know if there's a way to explain it simply.

SPEAKER_01

A lot of bilateral stimulation, and we take you out of the prefrontal cortex and put you back into your amygdala, right, which is where we hold our emotions or hormonal regulation. We take you out of the logic brain. We try and logic away everything. And as as you use a bilateral stimulation, it's very scripted, and the clients don't have to tell me what they're working on. So a lot of times people don't want to talk because they don't want secondary trauma, they don't want great trauma in the therapist. So I say, give me one sentence of what you're working on. It might be a car accident I saw. Great, that's all I need to know. I don't need to know more. And they don't have to share anything throughout. So it's bilateral stimulation, and then we do we erase and we erase the sensations and emotions and replace them with positive. We positise things that are negative in their life. And they get it.

SPEAKER_00

That's incredible.

SPEAKER_01

They get to do it. Yeah. So fascinating to watch. I just say, let's do this, and their brain will go there. It just goes there.

ART Vs EMDR And A Police Story

SPEAKER_00

So I know that bilateral stimulation is similar to what is used in EMDR. So can you talk about what the difference is between those two modalities?

SPEAKER_01

Um, I am not an EMDR therapist, so that's going to be hard for me to tell you the difference from what my training, but I can tell you what I've been told. I've been told with EMDR, and I have seen this because my best friend is an EMDR therapist, is EMDR you can process for hours, days, months, years afterwards. You have a session and you process afterwards. What my clients have told me, what the therapists I've had that have been trained in both, have told me is ART is EMDR on steroids. It's faster, it's quicker, it's less traumatizing to the client, it's less traumatizing to the therapist. So when you walk out of my office after an ART session, that issue is gone. It is resolved. Done. Can I share an experience of that? Yeah, I'd love, I'd love to hear that. Yeah. The first officer I did it on, who had his body cam on the whole time and I didn't realize it, right? His first officer, he was an officer for 20-something years, but his first officer-involved shooting was in Orm. And he was every time he drove down the street, he got nauseous and ready to throw that memory of that officer involved shooting. So I did an ART session on that for him. He came in the next time he said, What did you do to me? And I said, What do you mean? What did I do to you? And he said, I was on that street and I didn't even realize no more nausea, no more anxiety driving down the same street one session.

SPEAKER_00

That's incredible. I wish that I'd I wish I'd known that before I'd done the EMDR. And I don't want to bag EMDR. It it was a huge blessing for me, but yeah, it was like it was like a month and a half of like serious trauma because I was reprocessing everything and I was it felt like I was back in the experience for a month and a half. It was a very distressing experience.

SPEAKER_01

So because EMDR focuses on a emotion, we focus on the whole thing from start to finish. And we actually at the very end of ART, we have them visualize their future. What does your future look like with this gone? Right? And and that's powerful. It's like, wait, I can enjoy my kids now. I can drive down a street I couldn't drive down before. I don't have to drink as much. Yeah. Like we get all kinds of things that are just just beautiful. It's beautiful.

Critical Memory Integration Explained

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, that's incredible. So I want to shift to critical memory integration because I've never had anybody, I don't I will be honest, I've read about it, but I don't really understand it. So I would love for you to explain what critical memory integration is and how it is used in your practice.

SPEAKER_01

Okay. So we talk about trauma and ART. So here's the trauma experience. Why can one person be have a see a the same car accident as someone else and this one's traumatized and this one isn't? Does that make sense? We're asking all the time. How come many people can go through the same trauma and it affects some people in one way and some people in another? So critical memory critical memory integration actually to me is why that affects you. So trauma, this experience happened. Why am I reacting to it? And usually it's a childhood wound somewhere that we have to look at. An experience in childhood more than this trauma. So critical memory integration gets to our core selves. And it can be fast. And we we let them explore, we get curious about the emotion and the sensation in your body. And what I do with my clients is I say, let's let's just get curious. You're feeling a lot of anxiety in your chest, let that grow. Let's get curious about that anxiety. Let's see what it looks like. Give it a color, give it a sound, give it a taste if you need to, and we let it grow and grow and grow and get bigger, and then we look inside, right? And look inside at what's inside. Usually it's them as children. I'll give you a good example of that one, and then I'll tell you how we work with it. I had a firefighter in here and he was pissed. He was so angry because he had to go do training on how to clear a room that's in a fire, especially with funk beds. I said, help me understand that. Tears in his eyes. He said, Because if someone would have done it right, I wouldn't have had to find the four-year-old. And I said, Okay, so I started some ART, and I these two work really well in correlation. And he had this emotion and it kept getting bigger and bigger. And I changed his CMI and I said, Okay, let's get inside that anger. As we got inside, he was a little four-year-old sitting on a bunch of bed and no one came to him when he was sad. And no one helped him. So I said, Let's set with that four-year-old. As an adult, older, wiser firefighter, set with the four-year-old little guy who wanted help and listened to what he has to say to you. And he said, The little boy talked to him, he was a little younger self talked to him. And his older, wiser self reassured his younger self. And through it all, through it all, his little guy quit crying. He said, Someone does care about him.

SPEAKER_02

And the anger dissipated was gone.

SPEAKER_01

So he's angry about having to teach how to clear a room because his little four-year-old self was never held or held or nurtured. And when he could do that, but now it's okay. So that's incredible. Critical memory integration, it goes to your core self, the core wounds that make us respond to things the way we do. And it's not it's just it's a beautiful process.

SPEAKER_02

Yeah.

Firefighter Example And Inner Child Healing

Moving Past Labels Toward Curiosity

SPEAKER_00

And it's and I I think when I I love I love listening to descriptions of these types of modalities because one of the big problems we have in our society is we've pathologized symptoms. We have created pathology around anxiety, around depression, around, you know, even mania, and and it ends curiosity into the source. We stopped looking for the we thought stop looking for the source because we believe we've been given an answer. When we're given a diagnosis, bipolar diagnosis, uh, you know, obviously is the focus of this podcast, but people stop looking for answers. And I stopped looking for answers. I spent, you know, 12 years in psychiatric treatment on drugs and in and out of hospitals, and therapy was totally useless because I was doing talk therapy. And when you stay in the upper part of your brain, you don't actually ever get to the, you know, I can be super logical. And I was an expert on all the issues that I had, but I couldn't fix them. I couldn't resolve them. And when we start looking, I love what you said, looking with curiosity. When we are taught to pathologize these symptoms like anxiety or anger or, you know, you know, depression, there is no curiosity, there's judgment. We're judging the emotions and saying that they're bad and we want to suppress them with drugs or, you know, get them to go away. They're a disorder, our brain is something's wrong with our brain. But when we look with curiosity into it, why is our brain reacting that way? What is what is the source? What's actually causing the brain to react this way? And I love what you're saying about sitting with it and allowing it to grow so that you can get inside of it and find out like, where did this come from in the first place? And then you can give the person what they actually need to, you know, and integrate, you know, integrate that back in so that they're so they're not getting triggered. You know, one of the things I want to ask you a little bit about this in your experience, it took a long time for me to unwind all of the different symptoms I experienced because because everything got lumped into buckets, so anxiety was all lumped into one bucket and depression was all lumped into one bucket, you know, and so it took years for me to parse out symptoms and start seeing them as in, you know, as separate, you know, the the issues that they were and the separate sources that they had, you know. So I started recognizing not all of my anxiety acts the same. No, you know, some of the anxiety is like my body is not getting the nutrition it needs, and I'm it, you know, things are not behaving, my brain does not behaving the way that it should. Some of it is like trauma responses to things. You know, I have a situation happen and I don't feel safe, and my brain goes into fight or flight, and I my body starts to my chest gets tight, I can't breathe. And so then, you know, what you're talking about is taking that further and looking inside of it and saying, What why do I feel unsafe in this situation? What it is about this situation that makes my brain feel why can't you breathe?

SPEAKER_01

Let's get curious about that. Yeah. Right. And so then we get curious about that, and it takes you back to an instant where you didn't feel safe. The first time your chest was tight and you nurture that little girl. You, as an older, wiser self, can can heal your little girl whose chest was tight and didn't feel safe. But we don't know that we can do that. So, one of the things we do is I teach my clients to do that all the time. After we do a CMI session, I'll say you can do this at home. You can visit your little girl as often as you want to visit her. Anytime you feel a sensation, let's just just get curious about it. Ask her about it. And that little girl can be even pre-birth, was my little girl. Wow. My little girl was still in whatever the world. I think it's a pre-existence before we came to this earth. I was conceived out of rape. I didn't want to come. I didn't want to be on this earth. And I never felt like I belonged. And my CMI session took me back and helped me learn to belong. And that was two years ago. Two years ago, I finally felt like I belonged on this earth because I was able to heal what I call my zygo. I gave her permission to be here. That's incredible. It was it was just an amazing experience.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. One thing that I'm curious about is what is you said that in your bio it says that you are working with the CMI team to develop this for groups. What does that look like?

SPEAKER_01

So I run retreats. So that's in my bio too, right? And I I love this concept of CMI. I love it. I love the practice, I love the spirituality of it. It's such a spiritual piece to me to be able to explore that with clients. Well, I because I ran groups, run groups, and because I run retreats, I used it at one of the retreats right after I was trained because we do try retreats usually March and September. I was trained in February, went to a retreat in March and I had 12 women there. And we were working on I have to remember what that topic of that retreat was because we changed the topic every time. Oh, we were working on becoming connected to ourselves, walking with ourselves, right? So I just asked a question of the group. I said, We're gonna go into this thing. Here's what I want you to think about. And we always I always invite them to close their eyes and put their hands on their chest, right? Because this app actually gives your body the physiological response of a hug. So you're nurturing yourself, you're hugging yourself. And I asked the group to focus on when they learned when they first realized they couldn't walk. Right. And it was a little bit more complicated than that, a lot more detail. And all 12 women participated except for one who said it was too hard, she walked out, which is fine too. It's okay. And we had different emotions. Some people were sobbing, some people were upset, some people were not. It was it was beautiful, and then they came back and shared. Well, we want to do that more often, you know. Can you imagine that in a group of veterans? Can you imagine that in a group of women who've just been with a part of it? Yeah. Right? All of those things. And so my goal is to help that we can, you know, um, help more people in a smaller instead of an hour, an hour, an hour. And CMI can take anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour. It really doesn't have a time limit on it. Can you imagine having 10-15 people at one time in that hour instead of one person and the healing process that comes with it? And I've run it in three groups, three retreats I read. And the outcome is beautiful. It's just beautiful. Usually in groups, we let them journal afterwards. Just journal about your experience and then share a few more. I remember one girl said that on the very first one she was 17, pregnant, wasn't telling anything. And it was the first time she allowed that 17-year-old to grieve what her life is. Isn't that CMI session? That could be CMI session.

SPEAKER_02

That's incredible. Yeah.

CMI In Groups And Retreats

SPEAKER_00

I can't imagine. I I can. I actually think that it's really incredible because with my coaching group, you know, there is so much power in the feeling like somebody else understands what you're going through. And, you know, it's I I can imagine, especially with like especially the application with veterans, you know, where there's other people because a lot of times I've, you know, when I do speak with veterans, I actually had a you know, somebody on my podcast a couple weeks ago that was she's a veteran and ended up in the psychiatric system and just totally traumatized by psychiatric drugs and that. And nobody asked her. Like the things, if you think about what she went through, you know, she was in the first deployment for the, you know, for the Iraq war. There were so many people that were suffering and nobody understood what they were going through, and they just started labeling it with psychiatric disorders and drugging them up. Yeah. And and we wonder why we have so many veterans who are who are giving up, you know, and and to be able to help them in a in a setting where they feel like they're not the only one. It's not the only you know, they're not the only person going through this is really incredible. I can't, you know, that would be an incredibly powerful approach.

SPEAKER_01

Then that's why I like group work. So many people feel they're alone. And they're not. I'm running a Gottman group right now with six couples and they're married four months to thirty years. And the their experience they share and they realize they're not alone, and they realize that others understand. Well, I love that with with our I train, do mental health training in our police departments, right? And and to do some of that and help them understand and be able to have a safe place to talk about those experiences and to learn how to deal with it. Group work is powerful. Powerful because you're not alone. And it it's the first time many people feel like others understand. So then doing CMI in groups where you're having the same experience, that's completely different, but the same. Because it's individual to you, but these other people understand the experience because they're having it.

Why Talk Therapy Can Stall

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, and I one of the things that I love about this too, a lot of my initial experience, so the first at least 12 years, maybe 15 years of my experience with therapy, group therapy, and that was terrible. Yeah. And I hated it. I I didn't, and a lot of it had to do with feeling like we were just all w wallowing in our misery together. There was no, there was no, there was nothing offered that made me feel hope or made me feel like we were going to get out of what we were going through. I felt like we were all just being victims together. And there was uh one experience that I had where I was in an I had been hospitalized and was released into an outpatient program. And I went one day and I refused to go back. I'm like, that's making me worse. I'm not gonna do that again because I felt like I felt more depressed after the group session than I did before I went into it. And I realized that it's the same, it was the same issue that I was having with therapy, which was talk therapy was staying in the upper part of my brain. And I was not able to access the lower part of my brain where all of the trauma and the anxiety responses and the you know, depressive responses, all of those emotional responses to the trauma existed. And I would just talk about the problems, which made them bigger. It made them feel worse. It made me feel like I and I kept quitting therapy because I'm like, that just makes me feel worse and I can do that for free with a friend. Like I don't need to pay somebody for that. And so it took a long time for me to understand that therapy could actually help because I didn't and I didn't know anything about modalities. And the things that you're talking about are so they feel revolutionary to me, honestly, because I'm I I don't think I feel like there are is a and I don't know if it's I I don't know if it really is just happening in the last like 15 years, maybe, that all of a sudden there's like all of these different therapy modalities that are are helping us to get to the source of trauma and actually resolve the sources of trauma and helping people actually heal. Whereas in the past, it was just talking about our problems. And I think that there's value in things like cognitive behavioral therapy and dialectical behavioral therapy and that. But if you are not treating the source, I think that you can stay on the surface with those, with those treatment approaches because you're not, it's the same kind of thing. We're staying in the upper part of our brains with those often and not able to actually access and resolve the underlying sources. So I feel like there's like layers of treatment that need to happen where you get first, we resolve all these really tough issues. And I'm excited about the ART and the CMI, you know, as additional therapy modalities for people to look into. And then you can start working on the thought patterns that were created when we, you know, because of the trauma, right?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. And that that's exactly right. I dbt, CBT, we use them, right? I'm I'm trained and we use them, but we use them logically. We don't use them emotionally. Right. And they're just symptoms. All those are doing is dealing with the symptoms. If I want to heal the whole person, I don't want to deal with symptoms all the time. And I'm a talk therapist, I can talk with the best of them if that's what we need. Right? But I can and I can teach skills with the best of them, but I can't go home with that. I can't make them practice that. And so much of that is practiced outside of the therapy office, that's not what we're doing inside. Right. Well, ART and CBT and CMI is what we're doing inside the office. And they don't have to practice outside because we've filled the wound. And you still can do CBT, you can still do DBT, you can still do ACT, you can still do all of it, and they're great skills, but they're treating symptoms. They're not treating them.

Building A Trauma Proficient Clinic

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. And one of the things that I recently started like understanding better is for me, for example, when when you have wounding, especially if you have wounding in your childhood, our brain tries to cope with it. It try, it comes up with ways of coping. And some people have very obvious coping mechanisms, you know, like drugs and alcohol, right? But there are things that are not as obvious, you know, negative thought and behavior patterns that that are internal that people don't see that the person is suffering and that that's how their brain has learned to cope. We have so many people who are, you know, I had a practitioner on recently that works with people who dissociate, you know, and he was talking about how most of us dissociate in some form or another. You know, it's not, it's not to the extreme that somebody ends up with like a diagnosis of dissociated identity disorder, but but when we're like scrolling, you know, they call it doom scrolling or, you know, getting lost in binge watching shows and things like that was one of my coping mechanisms for years, you know, and the thought and behavior patterns that develop out of these things, a lot of times you can resolve the underlying issue. So, you know, we I talked I talk a lot about, you know, identifying the source. Let's identify what's the actual source of the trauma, what's what's going on here. Identify that, resolve it. But then you have to like create new habits. You know, you have to like change the way your brain thinks now because you've spent, you know, 40 years thinking this way about yourself because of this on you know, the trauma. And now the trauma's gone, but you have this habit that you've created. So there's like, that's one of the things I want to talk a little bit more about how your your clinic evolved. Because one of the things I was talking with, I'm blanking on her name, but she's uh one of your one of your, she does, she's a coach there. Mo, yes. So I was talking to her, and one of the things we were talking about, she's, you know, she's a life coach that works in your practice. And she said she might be working with somebody and they discover that there's some things that need to be resolved. So then she can refer them to practitioners in your practice. And I'm like, that is brilliant, because a lot of times people don't understand. Like I said, you know, we pathologize these issues, you know, and so people think they have a disorder and they don't think that there's anything they can do about it. So they're working, they're taking medication and they're working with a life coach, but nothing's working because they're working on the surface with all of this stuff. And I love with your practice, and I'd love to hear a little bit more. Like I said, I'll stop talking in just a second, but but how you developed your practice and you know what what the philosophy is there, because you have so many different pieces that are offered in your practice, you know, family therapy, individual therapy, marriage counseling, you know, life coach that all can work together if you've got practitioners that understand how to start like getting to the sources of issues and how do we how do we create a plan that's going to help somebody not just solve their own issues, but then start working on the system, you know, the family system that has now been harmed by somebody struggling with their mental health. So can you talk about your practice and how you evolved into the practice that you have now?

First Responder Nonprofit And Training

SPEAKER_01

Well, again, it's such a God thing for me. There is no coincidence in my practice. Nuts. I can't tell you how many times there's been someone in crisis and I had a cancellation right. I can't, but my biggest thing, and I'll tell you, my biggest thing is I want everybody who walks through my door to feel a sense of safety and peace that they can't feel anywhere else. And a good an example of that, it was really kind of funny, is when someone calls in and we ask them how they heard heard about us. You know, that's just part of our intake. And um, I get DoorDash delivered kind of regularly because I don't have time to do anything else. This girl said, I I delivered the DoorDash three months ago, and I thought if I ever needed therapy, I wanted to come to somewhere that made me feel like you're practicing it. So that is my number one goal. When you walk through my door, I want you to feel a sense of safety and peace. And if my practitioners can't contribute to that, they can't be part of us. So I'm very, you know, very prayerful about who I hire. I just have a brand new student who just graduated from school, and I said to Mo last year, I'm not taking any more students, I'm done. I don't want to intern anymore. And then I got this resume, and God said you're supposed to work with them. I'm like, okay, whatever. So it's such a God journey for me. Okay. When we open, I just went around to different businesses by us and said, Hey, we're here just letting you know. Can I walk into the police department in Linden, Utah, which is a very small police store? Can I talk to the chief and I said, Hey, we're here, and he said, I believe in therapy. And I believe all our first responders need therapy, and my guys will start coming to see you. Right after that happened, George Floyd in Minnesota happened, right? And I had someone approach me who said, My friend and I were talking about it, but we decided instead of talking about George Floyd, we should be about it. And I know you work with first responders. Can we start a nonprofit? I said, You know, we talked about the dream, and the dream was that all first responders in the state of Utah could receive therapy. So I started a nonprofit and it was beautiful. We helped train over 200 therapists in Utah and ART. Um, and we got contracted with all these um departments throughout the state of Utah. Well, nonprofit was so successful that we couldn't fund it anymore. We were spending sixty thousand dollars a month in the state of Utah for first responder therapy. Our funders just ran out of money, right? So that kind of started our journey. In that journey, I realized that they needed more. They did more. I was already trained in ART, but they needed more. And so I still work with a lot of first responders, but I needed someone needs IFS, they need parts for it. I'm not an IFS therapist, but Harmony is. And she's also trained in ART and CMO. So all of my therapists have to be trained in ART and CMO. That is required. I don't like to do addiction work. Now we get it all the time, but Spencer, my new student who just graduated, is very good in addiction work. So so I want to be able to heal and not just treat, heal the majority. I don't want to be able to just talk to the majority. And so as they start learning things, we have a women's visual art group. We have an art studio because some people can't talk about it. There's a sign back there that says I can say things in color and shape that words will never express. Right? So we do it's just whatever the need is. I run a boundaries group because someone said, I don't understand them. How do we do boundaries? Okay, let's run boundaries. Right? So we run a group, but my practitioners all have to be trained in best practices, and then they can branch out from there in what is best practice to them. IFS is great. It's great. I think it's beautiful. I think it's beautiful. But that's not where I go. And I want them to have their own personalities and their own explore their own journeys and find out what works for them after you train an ART in CMI. I have a practitioner right now who is of active duty military, he's my age, active duty military, getting ready to resign to retire, who's been all over the world doing therapy for veterans. And now he's he's worked for the Department of Public Health, which I didn't know was a military department, it is, doing it helping veterans get occupational therapy and physical therapy and those resources, and then he does therapy. Well, my other veteran who's was a a captain in Iraq, colonel in Iraq, doesn't want to talk to me about that experience, it'll talk to him. So we have to have that diversity and that breadth of modalities so the needs can get met.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I was in, I was I was starting to go through and try and make a list. I was going through all of their bios in there, and I you have IFS, CBT, DBT, mindfulness-based stress reduction, acceptance, you know, AI acceptance and commitment therapy, which is ACT, EMDR. I, you know, so I was just like, this is incredible. All of these modalities in one in one clinic is really impressive. And I said, I think I told you before we started recording there. I'm not saying that there aren't other clinics out there like this, but this is the first one I found. And I've done a lot of research because not just for myself, but for, you know, I've got people asking me all the time, like, well, you know, where where can I get good therapy? And I I want to have good practitioners that I can refer people to. And this is like seriously one of the most impressive clinics that I've seen. And I'm not saying that to try and like stroke your ego. It's just really impressive. It's really amazing because most people when they go seek therapy don't know what they're doing. I I remember when I was sent to go, you know, to therapy the first time, I was like, I don't understand why I'm doing this, and I don't understand what I'm supposed to do. You know, I just and if you get a therapist, and therapists are people, and they you can get you can get a you know, a I shouldn't say bad therapist, but an incompetent therapist.

SPEAKER_01

Like you know, I mean shop for that reason. If if I'm not the right therapist shop, yeah. If I'm not the right therapist for you, let's go help you find one that is.

SPEAKER_00

But people don't know what to look for a lot of times. Like they don't understand like the purpose of therapy, they don't understand what to look for. And I was being told that I was I was going to therapy by, you know, I was told by psychiatrists I needed to go learn coping mechanisms because there was no idea of me healing, especially back in 1998 when I was first diagnosed, right? And and every time I would go, it would make me feel awful. And so I just kept quitting. And I'm will be forever grateful that I listened to the last person that was like, please just try one more time. It was a my church leader, and he, I was in crisis at the time. We were really struggling with some pretty big family issues. And and I was, you know, asked to try one more time. And I'm like, I will try one more time, but I'm never doing it again if this is the same as it's been every other time. And thankfully I ended up with a good practitioner who she was an EMDR therapist, and it worked wonders when I went with her. And that like revived my hope in the industry. And then, you know, but all all these, all these different modalities that you have give people options and they give therapists so many tools to work with to tailor their therapy to the client and help the client. You know, I always say therapist, a good therapist is a facilitator and they are helping you work with, you know, you be in the driver's seat and you work with healing and you know, discovering and identifying and healing your own issues so that we don't feel like helpless. We don't feel like a victim.

Teaching Clients Skills Between Sessions

SPEAKER_01

That's why I want to teach, that's why I want to teach my clients. You can do this outside. They can even do some some I move outside to reduce body sensations. I teach them how to do that. Right? When you when you leave, if you start to feel these body sensations on any other, put your hands about this far apart or look at a window or a picture and move your eyes back and forth for about 30 seconds, recognize what's happening in your body. Usually it takes twice. So be aware of that, sometimes three times, but just notice the sensations in your body. Move your eyes back and forth about shoulder. Like I want them to have the skills. If I if I get fired because they've learned it, great. Yeah, great. I don't want to keep clients for 10, 15 years.

SPEAKER_00

Do I have to do there's plenty of well, and there's plenty of people out there that need help. It's not like a therapist needs to keep on to the same clients for the whole time. You know, there's lots of people who need help and not enough good therapists to go around, in my opinion.

unknown

I agree.

Intake That Actually Finds Causes

SPEAKER_01

I agree. And that's why I want to help facilitate some of the trainings. I want the therapist to have these skills to be able to do some of the things. And that's that's difficult. So I want to go oh go ahead. The other thing I think is really important in therapy is a good intake session, right? Yes. I remember listening to you and no one asked you about trauma. Well, I don't understand that. I don't understand that because that's part of our intake form. Our intake form we're asking about your diet, we're asking about your sleep, we're asking you about your trauma, we're asking you about your addictions, we're asking all those questions, and my style, which is different than most, I ask them what they like to do. What are your hobbies? What makes you mad? What things make you mad? And I let 'em ask me a couple questions because I'm gonna ask them 700 questions over the next little while. You can ask me a couple, right?

SPEAKER_02

But because I'm asking you all these hard things. Yeah. So it's it's it's part of the intake. We have to know those things.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, and that was one of the things that I loved when I first talked to you. It's why I wanted to interview you on my podcast, is there are again, I keep going back to this, but because we pathologized these symptoms, there's no curiosity into what else happened in your life. That we all all we're being asked is what the symptoms are, severity, you know, frequency, you know, history of family history of symptoms, like, you know, family history of psychiatric diagnosis. And there's no nobody asked me when I went in for my initial psychiatric physics. Nobody asked me about my past. Nobody asked me my story. Nobody asked. That's why I asked people to tell me their stories all the time. Because there's so many clues in the story. Like when somebody starts, and it doesn't take very long. You don't have to spend hours and hours with somebody usually to to find the clues of like, oh, we gotta work on this, we gotta work on this. Like, there's there's very there's like gigantic red flags that are like, well, the yes, of course you've got these symptoms. These you've got these things that have happened in your life, you know. This is your normal body's reaction, your brain's reaction to this trauma.

SPEAKER_01

And sometimes I don't even get to the symptoms in my intake. I don't even get to it because that's not most important. Right. Right. I've always been told I was depressed. Okay, we'll talk about depression. But that's what it is. We'll talk about depression. That's not the most important.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Well, and I I had one time when I was talking to somebody and they told me that they were always sad their whole life. You know, she said, from my early childhood, I was just sad. And and the way she was saying it was like, I just have always had depression. And so I started asking her some questions and I said, So tell me, let me, you said you from your childhood, what is what you know, what tell me about your childhood? And as she talked about it, it became very easy to understand why that little girl felt so sad. And I said, Did anybody ask you why you felt sad? You know, and she said, Well, no, I just had depression. And I said, But why were you sad? And as we talked about it, I said, somebody should have said, you know, and I said her name, I said, Why are you sad? Tell me why you're sad and talk to you about, you know, as she as you talked to me about your childhood, you had a sad childhood. Like, of course you were sad. And nobody ever asked you about it. Nobody ever gave that little girl what she needed. And that's one of the things I loved about what you were saying when you were talking about like the CMI and the ART, that those needs weren't being met. And so your brain is trying to meet the needs in the best way it can. And as we're, you know, in our youth, we don't have the skills necessary to understand what we're dealing with. Or so we we come up with uh often very unhealthy ways of coping with things, right? And then then if it's pathologized, then we think we're broken, you know, and we we develop this idea of who we are based on you know all of these unhealthy things that that got built around this trauma or this, you know, the neglect or whatever it was in the childhood that that left you feeling, you know, unwell, left your brains, you know, grasping for things to try and care for itself.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. And and so we survive. We survive with the cards we've been given.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

And it's not anybody's fault necessarily. Sometimes there are neglect and abuse and things that we can say. You were victimized, but you don't have to be a victim, which is a big thing to me, right? But we find these survival skills. Well, if we're have these survival skills or maladapted coping skills, right? There's a reason underneath that. And yes, do I have to keep you safe? Yes. Does your life matter? Yes. If you're suicidal, I will hospitalize you straight out. Your life is more important to me, right? But why are you suicidal? Let's talk about that. Let's figure it out because that is just your coping skill, right? That's your survival skill. Why did you have to survive? Why can't you just enjoy life and thrive? We have to figure that out.

SPEAKER_02

That's the piece that's more important because I don't want to hospitalize you. Right? I want to help you deal. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

I know. The first time that I started learning about parts work and IFS and that, I was kind of blew my mind because all of a sudden all of these things started to make sense. I'm like, oh. So when I was experiencing suicidal ideation for those years that built up to the attempts, my brain was trying to solve the problem and there were no other options left. And so it was like, well, this is the only option we have left. And so my so instead of feeling like there's something really wrong with me, it was starting, it was, it enabled me to start having compassion for myself and recognize like my brain was just trying to help me. Yeah. And it was this, it was trying to solve the problem and it had gone through all of the other options and there was nothing left. And so it was like, well, this is the option. So this is what we need to do now. And it was not helping me in a helpful way, but it was trying to help me. And it helped me to have compassion for that part of myself and not feel like there's like, oh, don't tell people that that's you know, normal people don't think things like that. That was a thing that I that kept me from asking for help for years was don't tell anybody you're thinking that because normal people don't think that way, you know? Yeah, they do.

SPEAKER_01

Everybody has had suicide ideation, everybody has had thoughts of I don't want to do this anymore. Life would be easier instead. Right? Everybody and they tell me they haven't, I know they're lying, because everybody has. That is normal. And we can normalize some of that too. Yeah. Right. Yeah, and and learn how to give your brain plan, that's a different but everybody has thoughts.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. And learning how to give your brain what it's asking for, like learning how to listen in a way that with curiosity and think, okay, that's not healthy, but there's something going on that's making my brain reach out in an unhealthy, unhealthy way, you know. So, oh man, this is so amazing. So when somebody comes to your clinic, how do you decide like how you know who who's gonna treat them? Is that is there like a method to that or do they Yes and no?

unknown

Okay.

Boundaries That Are Not Rules

SPEAKER_01

My I my schedule's very full, and I only do word of mouth referrals. So if they can't wait for my schedule and we know what their need is, we get a little bit of what their need is, that will decide. And again, it's a God thing for us. It is. Like I'll I'll read their intake because every intake goes through me before they're assigned, and I'll read their intake and I'll say, Oh, this person needs this person needs Jen. Right? Not everybody likes to do couples work. Jen and I will do couples work, so that kind of narrows that down, but it really is prayerful to me. And Mo is a rock star like that, she's very prayerful about things too. So she'll say, Jenny, here's this intake, and I think they should go to this person, and I trust her, and I know that that's it. So it really is just if they ask for someone directly, we get them into that person directly. If they ask, if they come in with specific things, um, whoever fits that need the best, but it's also who where they're supposed to be.

SPEAKER_00

Can I ask you about boundaries? I've talked about it on my podcast myself. Um, and I do think there are a lot of people who don't really understand what boundaries are. They don't. It's something that is like, especially when somebody, if you've got it, especially in like marriages and in family systems, if you've got at least one person in that family system that is struggling with mental health, and and even more, especially if they have been diagnosed with, you know, any kind of psychiatric condition, you end up with unhealthy boundaries just by default. Like it's just there's just no way to, you know, it's almost like people don't think that it's possible to have healthy boundaries in those situations because that person is sick and they can't help themselves, right? And so then you end up with like all these uh unhealthy dynamics. And so I talk about how critical healthy boundaries are in order to actually, you know, heal and recover. So can you talk? Would you mind talking a little bit about? Like how you describe boundaries to people and what that looks like, you know, so people understand. Cause I think what there's so much talk online about boundaries and not all of it accurate. And so people don't have an understanding of what a boundary is. I didn't. I I finally admitted it to my therapist at one point. Like, she kept talking about their boundaries, and I'm like, okay, so I don't actually understand what boundaries are. Can you tell me what you're talking about, please? So would you mind sharing like what you share with people?

SPEAKER_01

So the two things I talk about is internal and external boundaries, right? Internal boundaries are where I end and you begin. So let's say my husband comes up and he starts yelling at me because I forgot to turn off the light. Well, I have to look at myself. Did I create that problem? Did I contribute to his anger? And the answer is no. I didn't have to make him angry. Did I forget to turn out the light? Probably, but he chose the anger. So I don't have to respond to that. I can say, oh, I'm sorry I didn't turn out the light, but I don't have to react to his anger because I didn't create it. Does that make sense? That's an internal boundary. I end here, you begin there. And if I didn't step into your beginning, that's not mine. But x external boundaries are this is mine. This is what I'm going to do. A rule is what I expect from someone else. And most people think boundaries are rules. You cannot speak to me that way. That's that's a rule. And I have no power over anybody else. I only have power over J. My boundary is that if I'm spoken to disrespectfully, I will leave the situation. And two things I don't tolerate. I don't tolerate dishonest dishonesty, I don't tolerate disrespect. I'm very my boundaries are very tight around this, right? So if it's someone I care about, I'll say, I would love to have that conversation with you when the tone is more respect. Until then we're going to disengage from I will disengage from this conversation. If it's someone I don't have a good relationship with, I don't know, I just leave the situation. My boundary is I won't be in a conversation with disrespect. I can't tell you not to disrespect me. I can't walk with a sign on my chest saying don't disrespect me. But I if I feel disrespected, I can handle it myself. So a boundary is personal to me. It's not a rule for someone. And I teach people that all the time, and then we start practicing simple boundaries, right? Not all boundaries have to be shared, which is unheard of for most people. Well, I have to tell them how I'm going to do it. Actually, you don't now get a partnership, a marriage, that type of relationship, some of my boundaries will be shared with my spouse. But not everything. Not all boundaries because they're so personal to me. I don't have to tell everybody my boundaries. And that's where people get caught because they think it's a rule, and I have to share the rules. You're right. Rules have to be spoken, but you can't force them. Boundaries are yours. They're nobody else's. They're mine. Mind is set, mind to hold, mind to be consistent.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, and personal accountability, you know, it's that's one of the things I, you know, I was I'm always talking about like this is your responsibility, this is his responsibility. You have to stop trying to like fix each other and stop trying to get into each other's business because it's not going to help, first of all. You cannot fix another person. And and it can create resentment, it can create, you know, it it creates distrust. There's all these issues that are created when we try to get into, you know, like cross into each other's territory and start trying to fix the other person and change the other person. And that's one thing that I see all the time. And I wanted to ask you, I just out of curiosity, do you have people that will come to you for marriage counseling, for example? And as you're working with them, recognize we probably should do some individual work. Like, does that happen often and vice versa? Like when you've got somebody that's coming into you for individual therapy, do you ever suggest, like, I think it would be a good idea if you, you know, your you and your spouse came in for couples counseling? Like, is that something that you guys do in your clinic?

How To Find Better Therapy

SPEAKER_01

All the time.

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

And then they'll say, Well, will you see us for individual and for couples? And I said, It will depend. Because I don't mind doing that. Some therapists absolutely cannot separate you. I can't. But it will depend. It'll depend on my schedule. It'll depend on your schedule, it'll depend on the need, right? It it depends. But yes, all the time people come in an individual and they really need relationship work, and then they'll come in for relationship work and they've got their own childhood cultures and traumas that have come in that they have to kill for the relationship to work. So it just depends. But yes, we do that all the time.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Okay. And then my last question for you. Well, I've got two questions. I'm going to give you a heads up on the final question. So the final question is always like, what's your one one, you know, parting piece of advice that you would like to somebody to take away? But before I ask you that, so I'm going to give you a second to kind of think about that. But um, what would you recommend to somebody who has had bad experiences, say, you know, like I did with therapy, that is like listening to this and thinking, oh, maybe, maybe I could try it again. What would you recommend to them? Like, how would you recommend they approach looking for a good practitioner? You know, do you have resources you could recommend or do you have any ideas for them for how they can research modalities? Because I think that's one of the things that people struggle with is they don't understand any of these treatment modalities. And so that creates a barrier for them, you know, knowing what to look for in a therapist.

SPEAKER_01

I do think that's really important. I have to step in that world a little bit because I know treatment modalities. I know where to research and how to look, right? But I do I do recommend a lot of people when they call, they say I have trauma experiences. Okay, have you looked into ART or have you looked into CMI or have you looked? So we say that a lot on our intakes because that helps us assign a therapist too. But just start looking best practice for trauma. Like ART is recognized by the Veterans Administration as best practice, by Department of Defense, and by non best practice for PTSD, right? Best practice for PTSD and treatment resistant pressure, which we also have at our clinic. We have academy the on-staff doctor, right? So finding out what do I think I'm struggling with and what helps, and just go on AI, there's great things about it, horrible things about it. They are not a therapist, even though that's a number of the reason people use AI. But you can ask what is the best practice for being a victim of sexual assault? Ask them, they'll tell you where to look and how to look. Don't use them as a therapist, so they are not a good therapist.

SPEAKER_00

Awesome. And then what what is the one thing that you hope somebody will take away from our conversation? What's the the number one thing that you're hoping somebody will take away?

SPEAKER_01

No matter what you've been told, no matter how you feel, you are not broken. And there is you can heal. You can heal. And I think that's most important. I don't see anybody as broken. And they come in and tell me they are all the time, and they're not. They're not. They've had some hard experiences.

SPEAKER_00

They're not that's fantastic. All right, where can people find you if they want to connect with you?

SPEAKER_01

Oh, um, our website www.healthierucc.com. I have to think about that. Or they can just call it. It's 801-701-0348.

SPEAKER_00

Wonderful. I'll make sure all of your links are in the show notes so people can find you there. Thank you so much. This has been a fantastic conversation. I'm actually super curious now to look into these things, these modalities more because especially this, the the CMI. Like I just had never, when I was re reading through your bio, I'm like, what is that? And I was like typing it in, looking it up. And so I'm very excited to learn more about these things. And thank you so much for sharing what you have and for everything you're doing. It's it's just really inspiring. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks for having me on. It's been fun. Absolutely. All right, until next time, upsiders. Thanks for joining me on the Upside of Bipolar. Your journey to recovery matters, and I'm grateful you're here. For more resources, visit www.theupsideofbipolar.com. If you're ready to dive deeper, grab my book, The Upside of Bipolar: Seven Steps to Heal Your Disorder. If you're ready to heal your symptoms, join my monthly membership, The Upsiders Tribe, to transform chaos into hope. Until next time, Upsiders.