The Alimond Show

Hilary Tarkington Stowers - Your Intuition Is Your Superpower: Why Mental Health Is The Foundation For Everything

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What happens when your doctor dismisses your symptoms despite your body screaming that something's wrong? Hilary Tarkington Stowers knows this battle all too well. After nine grueling years of being misdiagnosed while battling chronic Lyme disease, Hilary transformed her personal health nightmare into a mission to help others through an integrative approach to healing both mind and body.

Hilary takes us on a fascinating journey through her evolution from certified holistic health counselor to licensed mental health practitioner. When clients initially sought her help for weight loss, she discovered their struggles were often rooted in unaddressed trauma, toxic relationships, or hormonal imbalances that conventional medicine had overlooked. This revelation led her to pursue mental health counseling, combining it with her nutritional expertise to treat the whole person.

The conversation delves deep into medical gaslighting—how easily women's health concerns get dismissed, especially around conditions like Lyme disease, lipedema, and perimenopause. Hilary passionately advocates for finding healthcare providers who listen and truly understand these issues, rather than telling patients to "white knuckle it" through suffering that could be addressed with proper care.

One of the most powerful metaphors Hilary shares is how she helps clients "reignite their spark" when life has dimmed their inner flame. Whether through toxic relationships, overwhelming responsibilities, or unprocessed grief, many women lose touch with their intuition and desires. Hilary's work involves helping them reclaim agency over their lives and reconnect with what truly matters to them.

The conversation also explores EMDR therapy, a fascinating approach to processing trauma that Hilary has both received and now provides. She explains how this technique helps reprocess painful memories to become "more historical than traumatic," creating distance that allows healing.

Hilary closes with a heartfelt discussion about grief literacy, drawing from her experience losing her mother to cancer and her training as a certified grief educator. She challenges our societal norms around supporting those in grief, emphasizing presence over platitudes and practical help over asking what's needed.

Ready to reignite your own inner flame? Subscribe to our podcast for more conversations that blend practical wisdom with heartfelt insights on navigating life's most challenging journeys.

Speaker 1:

It's Hillary Tarkington-Stowers and my company name is Holistic Health and Nutrition LLC and the DBA is Hillary Stowers Counseling, and I have a mental health counseling practice servicing people in the state of Virginia. Okay, awesome.

Speaker 2:

Now give us a little bit of a backstory about yourself and how you got into your industry and how you ended up choosing holistic medicine, Sure.

Speaker 1:

I'll try to Reader's Digest version this for you, but basically I'll try to readers digest for this version. Uh, this for you, but um, basically I was in a completely different field and I didn't really have any passion for it. Um, but I was plugging in my skills and abilities and traits into this other field and I was in it for quite some time, like 20 plus years but, um, unfortunately for me, I contracted Lyme disease unknowingly in 2001 when I lived in California and and I went on to be quite ill for the next nine years and found some holistic doctors when I relocated to Virginia, where, unfortunately, lyme disease is endemic, and it took them a couple of years, but they finally diagnosed me with chronic Lyme. In the meantime, I was learning about how nutrition impacted health and I had decided to go back to school up in New York City and get certified as a holistic health counselor. And the school I attended at the time well, it's called the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, but it was brick and mortar back then and now I think they only do online. So I was starting around.

Speaker 1:

This is probably like the summer of 2010, after I graduated, starting my own holistic health counseling practice geared towards nutrition, and my niche was people who had received a diagnosis and needing to relearn how to cook and grocery shop and eat for their newfound condition and naturally the specialty within that was Lyme disease. So while I had my day job, which paid the bills and had insurance through that, I would follow my passion nights and weekends and counsel people, and I partnered with what we call LLMDs Lyme Literate Medical Doctors or LAMPs Lyme Aware Medical Practitioners in Loudoun County and help support people, either through individual counseling or doing talks like at Ida Lee, where I've also been a spin instructor since 2007, educating people about the role nutrition plays in recovering from Lyme chronic Lyme disease. So I did that for a long time and then my clients started to change, people coming to me more under the auspices of wanting to lose weight. And then I would realize in working with them this really wasn't about the eating or the weight. It was about like maybe someone had been sexually abused as a child and never told anyone and became an emotional eater, or perhaps they were in a really toxic marriage and they were eating out of rebellion, and I'd have success with them in essentially determining this is the root cause, this is why you are doing this behavior. So then they would want to refer their friends and family to me and I was like I'm just a certified holistic health counselor? I don't, I'm not a therapist.

Speaker 1:

So this was at the beginning of 2020. And I just thought, why not me? And then I decided to pursue exploring, going to graduate programs. So I kind of blew up my life in my forties and transitioned out of working in my previous field and went to George Mason University. I got a master's in education with a concentration in clinical mental health counseling Nice. So I did that and worked for an agency when I was interning and then decided, because I'd already had the nutritional arm of my practice, to roll out the mental health counseling arm and really try to integrate the two. So I take a holistic approach when I'm working with mental health patients and take into account things like their nutrition and health and just take a macro view.

Speaker 2:

I guess yeah, absolutely. And now for those just getting to know you, what exactly is holistic counseling and how does it differ from traditional therapy?

Speaker 1:

CBT cognitive behavioral therapy it could be, you know, any type of acceptance and commitment therapy. There is a whole what I call toolkit of different types of modalities that you could employ. That's the more traditional approach and I'm trained in all of those theories and modalities and I call it my toolkit. I take more of an integrated approach, but I think what sets me apart is that I have the traditional or I have the non-traditional training in nutrition and I've also had a lot of my own medical challenges.

Speaker 1:

So when I'm looking at a person, if they come to me presenting with anxiety, I'm like what's the root cause of the anxiety? So is this situational? Are you in an unhappy marriage? Are you estranged from an adult child? Is it event-driven? Did something acute happen that is now causing you to have anxiety, resulting in panic attacks? Or are you maybe 52 years old and you're a female who is perimenopausal or menopausal, and then your symptom is anxiety? So it's really important for me to look at the whole person and what's going on. And I don't purport at all to be a doctor or have medical expertise, but I do partner with a lot of doctors. It ends up being, most of the time, I'll call them HRT literate, hormone replacement therapy literate MDs, who are oftentimes OBGYNs, and I also partner with naturopathic doctors and other people sort of in that realm, just to make sure that people are getting the care that they need from who they need it.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely, and we talked earlier and you had mentioned the term and maybe I'm going to butcher this, but what was it? Gaslighting, medical gaslighting? Tell me what that term is and what that means and how it's becoming an issue or maybe it's been an issue already in the medical field for some patients.

Speaker 1:

Sure. Well, I think I could speak to it on three different fronts First, having Lyme disease and being misdiagnosed. Second, I have another condition that I don't think is necessarily rare I think what's rare is that it is underdiagnosed called lipedema. And thirdly, I am a woman of that age where your hormones start to tank and you need hormone replacement therapy. So when I had the Lyme disease, I was misdiagnosed by a dermatologist in La Jolla and I had a bull's eye rash and everything and I went from being a really healthy, fit 20 something who would bike, walk or jog to crew and row for two hours and walk, bike or jog home to I was almost in a wheelchair. It went into my brain Lyme disease is known as the great imitator and it attacks the weakest systems and organs in your body. So it went into my brain and I would have complicated migraines with neurological side effects. It went and attacked my thyroid, which caused the other condition, lipoedema, to flare up. It went to my back just a myriad of different symptoms, but the thyroid was the main and initial presentation. And so I went from that healthy person to gaining a ton of weight, becoming extremely lethargic, and it was just this huge change and I would go to endocrinologists who specialize in thyroid. I can't tell you how many that I went to but they just kept treating the symptom, which was thyroid, and not trying to get to the root cause. Again, going back to your previous question, why it's important to me to treat people holistically and I wasn't getting better and they would just put me on a synthetic drug. Then they would put me on armor thyroid, then they would put me on a compounded drug. So they weren't really listening to me, they weren't really believing me and just kind of questioning it, and I had to fight like a dog in the street and be like my own patient advocate to get someone to listen to me. And it took, like I said, nine years to get a diagnosis. So, yeah, and I'm very grateful to the holistic doctors who did diagnose me and so I experienced it on that front.

Speaker 1:

And then the lipedema condition. It is something that affects 11% of the population, mostly women. It's probably more than that, because I think people are underdiagnosed and it is a lymphatic disorder, a connective tissue disorder. Some doctors are saying it's a collagen disorder and it's a fat disorder. It's not to be confused with lymphedema, which oftentimes affects breast cancer patients. So essentially, you have an unusual presentation of fat, more fat in your legs, and there are four different stages of it. Of the 11% who are affected, it also affects 80% in their upper arms. But the lymphatic system is self-pumping and you have an impaired lymphatic system. You bruise easily. You have very soft skin. You take a long time to recover from any type of injury to your leg.

Speaker 1:

If you get a cut, a bug bite, anything like that, you often have other comorbidities, like Ehlers-Danlos, which is hypermobility. You might have an exaggerated histamine response to a bug bite. For example, you might have mcas, which is um, uh, oh, my gosh, it just escaped my mind, but it's another. It's another, oh, mass cell activation syndrome, excuse me. So you might have some of those things going on. So when?

Speaker 1:

When it flares up is times of hormonal change. So when you're a younger girl, at the onset of your period. If you get pregnant at that time, when you enter perimenopause or menopause, it can flare up during those times. For me it flared up because the Lyme disease attacked my thyroid. Thyroid regulates hormones, and so then the lipoedema kicked in. So doctors were asking about what I was eating. Well, I had been a fitness instructor since 2007, very active despite the Lyme and just kind of fighting through. And also I was, as of 2010, a certified holistic health counselor. So I was shopping at the farmer's market every weekend, eating organic. I gave up gluten in 2008,. Could not take weight off, no matter how many rowing classes I took, no matter how many pureing classes I took, no matter how many pure bar classes I took, no matter how many spin classes I taught. So just a lot of those doctors wondering why my weight had gone up.

Speaker 1:

And the third arm of that, going to that demographic of women in typically their 40s and 50s starting to experience hormonal changes because your estrogen starts to go off a cliff progesterone, dhea, even testosterone. We as women have that as well, and so it manifests in different ways not just hot flashes, not just night sweats. It can cause anxiety, it can cause gluteal tendinopathy, it can cause ringing in your ears. There's just a long list of symptoms that I don't think people are familiar with. And if you get a doctor, whether it's your primary care or an OB, and they are not HRT literate, hormone replacement therapy literate, then they're going to tell you to white knuckle it. And there are so many things that can be done to help you, and there were studies done in 2002 correlating HRT to breast cancer and those have since been debunked. There's a wonderful doctor out of Texas named Mary Claire Haver and she's really spearheading education on this topic and I think she tells people to go to menopauseorg and that way, if you're really struggling as far as finding a practitioner who's qualified, there's a directory where you can got virtually no training.

Speaker 1:

Same thing on Lyme disease. One of my good friends is a doctor and at the time he worked in the ER and he asked me to help educate him on what signs to look for for Lyme disease. And also the medical field doesn't get any training in nutrition. So when, when the people who are treating us are not educated on Lyme disease, women's health, nutrition, all of that stuff, then they are ill-equipped to handle some of these things. So a lot of women are maybe experiencing traditional or non-traditional symptoms outside of, as I mentioned, something like night sweats or hot flashes, and they're being dismissed. And you can meet with a naturopathic doctor, you can meet with a regular MD who's literate in that field and you can get like creams, patches, compound they're all compounded from a compounding pharmacy or called bioidenticals, or something oral that you can take to mitigate your symptoms. You don't have to suffer.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, no. And I want to add to that a little bit. I'm very self-aware about like ticks. Every time I go out I check I tuck my socks in my pants or vice versa. I had a tick one time. I didn't feel well and I went to what was it? Urgent care? And I brought tick with me and I asked them like can you run tests and could you do something? And they were like no, throw that away. So I was just like okay, and I'm like I'm just going to save it. So I kept it in the freezer and then eventually just threw it away because I was like what if I had something? You know? I don't think that I do know right, but isn't that wild? At least give me an educated answer of why you won't do that.

Speaker 1:

They were just like no, just throw that away. First I want to say I'm sorry that happened to you. That is a version what you just described of medical gaslighting. You did the exact right thing. You just went to the wrong place, but you didn't know it, and that's the thing is-.

Speaker 2:

I didn were correct. You bring the tick and then labs that know what they're doing. Doctors know what they're doing.

Speaker 1:

They test the tick to find out what strains it has. Because Lyme disease and this is a tell. If a doctor says Lyme's disease, or any medical practitioner, they don't know what they're talking about, because it's named for Lyme, connecticut, where it originated. That's where it's suspected to have originated. So Lyme is an umbrella term. You could have Bartonella, you could have Babiosa, you could have all sorts of different strains of the disease. So someone who knows what they're doing would have tested the tick and then they would know, okay, she potentially could have been infected with this strain or whatever multiple number of strains, and then they would pick antibiotics that are targeted to address the strains you had. If people aren't fortunate enough to have the tick, then they'll typically just treat somebody who has a bullseye or knows they were bitten with maybe four to six to eight weeks of doxycycline, depending on the patient, depending on the doctor. But you did the right thing. They just were ill-equipped to help you, okay.

Speaker 2:

And I just wanted to make sure I was okay, cause I was like paranoid. I was like I hope I'm okay. My husband just kept like like you're fine. You're fine, but anyway, like see, these are some examples that maybe people need to hear ever be aware of me. Like I didn't know I was supposed to bring a tick, so I just wanted to touch on that and thank you, mentioned before so they can be self-advocators for themselves as well, so I think that's awesome.

Speaker 2:

And then I want to ask you you've mentioned helping women reignite their spark. What does that phrase mean to you, and where do you start with someone who feels dimmed by life?

Speaker 1:

Okay.

Speaker 1:

So the way that I see it because it's a very visual for me, I'm a visual person, I'm a visual learner is I think every human being has like a flame kind of in the center of their chest and I want it burning brightly. And so, for whatever reason, if your light has either been self-dimmed you know you've dimmed it yourself out of self-preservation or someone else, like a partner or maybe a toxic boss, they've snuffed it out. I want to get it flaming again, because that means you're kind of in survival mode and you're just on autopilot. And a lot of times this is happening to women and they might be in a toxic relationship or, like I said, working for a boss who's similar as far as the profile and they're trying to earn a living and they're trying to deal with perimenopause or menopause and they're trying to raise their children and they're trying to maybe a living, and they're trying to deal with perimenopause or menopause, and they're trying to raise their children and they're trying to maybe do something in their community. And so if they're kind of shut down, then their intuition has been dulled or dimmed or snuffed out.

Speaker 1:

And I feel like if you don't have your intuition activated, if all cylinders are not firing, then you can't make the best decisions for yourself and for your family, and oftentimes with women, they're mothers and they have a multiplier effect. So, if I can kind of sit down with them in sessions and unpack, what's going on, are you going through a major life transition? Did your partner die? Are you in an abusive relationship, whether it's professionally or personally? What is going on in your life that's caused this to happen? And let's try to figure out how you can claim, reclaim a sense of agency and make better decisions that are aligned with your goals, the future you desire and the person you want to be.

Speaker 1:

So, whether that means maybe you need to leave your partner, maybe you need to get another job, maybe you need to address an issue with an adult, a strange child, maybe you need to leave your partner, maybe you need to get another job, maybe you need to address an issue with an adult, a strange child, maybe you need to address something that happened to you when you were much, much younger, that you thought you had gotten over, but it's starting to pop up in your life now in different ways, whether it's like through a relationship or, you know, just in the form of anxiety or depression or whatever you know, just in the form of anxiety or depression or whatever.

Speaker 1:

But it's just so crucial like that, every human being have this, this fire, this flame, this bright light in their center that they're able to operate out of. And it's just so important to me that we get people tuned into that at a young age and it's whether you know, I'm teaching my own nephews about that from very early ages, or if I'm teaching my clients, because I typically see adults about that concept, then they can help their children or, you know, young people in their lives or other people in their lives kind of have an awareness about it, absolutely.

Speaker 2:

And then I want to also touch on mental health in general how, if that is not taken care of, how everything around you or in your life or yourself could fall apart, and why. That's a key, important subject to talk about for people, because maybe they're going through things and they don't think it's mental health. They're like, oh, I need to take some medicine for this, or maybe I need to just go do exercise, which does help, but if you don't address the issues that are going on with mental health, talk to me how that nothing will go like right for you. Essentially, like there will always be times where it's going to be difficult. You're going to keep spiraling unless you get you know, help or talk to somebody or address those issues.

Speaker 1:

I think um, the way that I want to answer this is my parents are much older and wiser and they would say if you don't have your health, you don't have anything. And they said health in a very broad sense. So clearly this covers physical health. If you have something physically where you're in pain, it's everything else just kind of falls away. But I think we should put an emphasis on mental health as well, and sometimes it could be like generational, sometimes it could be cultural. I have a dad who's 80 years old and he was of the era where people would talk about like going to a shrink, you know, talking about going to a psychiatrist, and he's also of that ilk, you know, you kind of just like get over it, like power.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 1:

So I just want to acknowledge that sometimes that's a by-product of your generation, sometimes it's a by-product of of your culture. Like there, there could be different reasons why people tend to shy away from it. And also people may have the wrong impression where it's like oh, you're crazy and you need help, and it's like no, no, no, no. Everyone goes through different life transitions where they could use a neutral third party to help talk them through. So it could be a job loss, it could be a divorce, it could be challenging parenting issues Again going back to toxic relationships, it could be any of those things. But if you don't address it, it's like whack-a-mole. It's going to constantly pop up someplace in other places in your life. Sometimes there'll be folks who maybe their coping mechanism a maladaptive coping mechanism is to internalize things. So they might appear to everyone else to be fine, but they're internalizing things and it's eating them up inside and then their baseline for patience is really quite a bit lower as far as their threshold. So something minor is going to set them off and I don't even know if they make the connection Like I've internalized all this. I'm so unhappy with whatever insert you know issue here that when something relatively minor occurs that they have kind of a hair trigger response to it and I really want them to think like what's going on? Like why am I maybe having an outsized reaction to something minor? So really just getting yourself the help to unpack whatever issues are going on in your life, it helps you stay calmer. Like we do things, like you know, in my sessions, like breathing exercises or I'm trained in EMDR, eye movement, desensitization, reprocessing which is used to treat PTSD or even used to help people like prep for interviews or prep for exams, and just kind of do exercises with them where I get them calm and centered. There's a lot of like visual guided, visual imagery, things like that, but it's my message is pretty much you don't have to suffer either. The same way I was saying about HRT or Lyme or whatever. You don't have to suffer, you can talk to someone and this isn't your sentence, like things don't have to be this way. And I mentioned initially about physical pain. If you are in emotional pain, if you are in emotional distress, you are suffering and if you have been taught like just white knuckle it or just get over it or I don't have time for myself, that's another thing.

Speaker 1:

I see A lot of women who put themselves last. They're like, well, I'm a mother and I'm a wife and I'm a sister, or even if you're in a sandwich generation, where you're helping, still take care of your own children. But then you have aging parents, like, you feel like I can't afford to take care of myself. But it's that old adage, you know put your own air mask on first. You are no good to anyone else if you don't take care of yourself. So sometimes, you know, we as women in this culture don't feel like we're entitled enough to take that time, because it's just like this martyr thing. You've got to be a mom, you've got to power through. You've got to work, you've got to do this.

Speaker 1:

Nobody asks a dad how do you do it all? Can you have work-life balance? Nobody's asking a dad about that. Or someone's asking the dad oh, you're babysitting your kids. He's not the babysitter, he's the father babysitting your kids. He's not the babysitter, he's the father.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, you know, and my girlfriend and I were talking about this the other day how a lot of times when men are caregiving like she was giving an example of you know, it was like her husband or cousin or somebody was at the airport with a baby and it's like everybody stopped to help this man, like get, help him, get his child for him, help him get his child a diaper, or you know like. Just they kind of like, or I think it was that that was her cousin's husband and then her husband was taking their children to the doctor. She's a full-time working mom, he's a full-time working dad and so anytime she shows up at the doctor they're like oh, mom's here, you know, kind of like she's not sticking to the prescribed role. So I think that is the unspoken cultural pressure that a lot of women feel and it's just like speak up, stand up. It's fine to have needs.

Speaker 1:

I mean, sometimes I'll ask a woman in an initial session or maybe the second session what do you want? And I've had people just start crying because they haven't been asked in so long what they want. That's so bad that you know it's just, they haven't even thought about it. They don't know what they want. That's so bad that you know it's just, they haven't even thought about it. They don't know what they want because they're so busy making sure everyone else gets what they want.

Speaker 2:

Yes, oh man, this kind of hurts, but it's okay. I need to hear it. I want to go back to EMDR and what that's like. What is the experience like when you're getting that done? I'm very curious. You said it was like visual.

Speaker 1:

Well, there are different aspects to it. So Dr Francine Shapiro designed this in the 1980s and it was initially created to help military people with PTSD and PTSD post-traumatic stress disorder. I don't even really believe in the D, because I think if you are exposed to something traumatic that you're having a natural human response. But I'm not going to argue with what's called the DSM-5 in my field on that right now. That's just my personal take. So she learned, after having success in treating veterans and I'll explain a little bit about what it is that it could extend to other people. It is that it could extend to other people. It could extend to people who've experienced trauma for different reasons, whether it's something significant like sexual abuse or, like I mentioned earlier, it could be something to help you prepare, feel like you have the resources to prepare to do well in an interview or to do well on a test.

Speaker 1:

Or even I've used it on a client for a breakup. He was having a really difficult response to breaking up with his girlfriend and that was successful. But what it is is it uses something called BLS bilateral stimulation and I use tappers that alternate vibrating, but some people will use fingers and do hand movement. Some people will use what's called butterfly tapping sort of lower like this or higher on the clavicle, especially if you're doing it over telehealth. But in person I like to use the tappers. But what is happening is you're using this BLS and getting people to take memories that are stored in a maladaptive way like a really terrible memory, and get them to reprocess it so it's stored in the brain in a more adaptive fashion, so then they are less hurt by whatever happened to them. So the way that I would describe it and I will self-disclose and I tell my clients I only self-disclose if it's therapeutically beneficial to you, but for the purposes of this interview, I was hit by a car as a pedestrian and so I went to an EMDR therapist to have her help me reprocess the car accident, and this modality has about an 85 to 100% efficacy of resolving the incident if it is an acute, single incident in one session and that happened for me.

Speaker 1:

This was well before I was ever trained in it, so I felt like it would make me a better practitioner to have been on the receiving end of it, and then I also went back to the same practitioner for EMDR when my mother died. My mother had cancer. I'm sorry, thank you. I appreciate that and she was a wonderful woman and I was very blessed, but she really my dad and I believed that she left us on a Sunday but her body hung on until Friday and it was really awful to watch this. And so I went back to this EMDR therapist and had her help me reprocess the last few days of my mom's life. That took several sessions because it wasn't acute, but it was effective.

Speaker 1:

And the way that I describe what happened to me is it was almost like gauze was put over the visual kind of buffering it for me. And when I have done EMDR on my clients, I've heard them describe it like the incident seems more historical than traumatic. The incident seems almost farther away in distance or proximity. It just seems like that it's more palatable for them. So that's something that I really like to keep in my toolkit. Like I mentioned earlier, I take an integrative approach, so I have all different things and it's not a one size fits all. I meet the person. The first few sessions are getting to know them and then I need to tailor their plan. Not everyone necessarily needs EMDR, but it's a really good thing to have?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, no. And if people are curious to try it or maybe nothing's worked and they find that maybe this has helped them and they're not even aware of this service, like, do a lot of doctors offer this or is it particular?

Speaker 1:

I actually don't know of any doctors who offer it. It's typically and that just might be me, but that doesn't know or therapists or counselors. It's therapists. So in the state of Virginia you're known as a licensed professional counselor. I'm considered a board certified resident in counseling and I'm also a national certified counselor. I'm also a certified grief educator and I'm trained in EMDR. But the people in this state who would be able to do it are typically LPCs, lcsws, which is licensed clinical social worker, lmfts, licensed marriage family therapists. Those are kind of like the main folks who tend to have the training. I don't know as much about the psychiatrist because they go to medical school and I don't know as much about the psychiatrist because they go to medical school and I don't know. It probably just varies based on the doctor if he or she wants to pursue adding that modality. But the psychiatrists are helpful to partner with for med management.

Speaker 2:

Okay, and that experience, just because I'm still curious as well. For some people you said it's kind of like historic and not traumatic, but hearing about it and like kind of thinking about, like you know, maybe if someone went through something, and like putting yourself mentally in that space, it kind of sounds scary you are very intuitive, it can be.

Speaker 1:

So what we do or I'll speak to what I do and, yeah, the training that I received. The training I received is through um, emdria, um, and it's a great organization. Actually, one of my good friends who's in LCSW in Maryland, she's becoming a certified um trainer, because you need people who are certified to teach people like me. Um, but what we will do, we don't just jump right into it. Like I said, I need to get to know the person and then I have a few exercises that I can do with them to help prep them. One of them is called container and, essentially, like I do this guided imagery. This is where I have them close their eyes. This is not involving the tappers, but I will walk them through, like coming up with what is a safe space, look like because this is something that happened to you that's affecting you. But I want you, through this visual imagery, to put it all in this container, and I'm really kind of abbreviating how the exercise goes, but it's so they feel like they can put it away and access it when they need it, so it's not constantly over them. That's one tool that we'll use to help them prepare. There's another activity called safe calm state. That is also guided imagery, and with the tappers, where I essentially walk them through this sort of visual, and at the end of the exercise what I'll do is I'll get them into a very relaxed state and then I will ask them about something that agitates them, but on a scale of one to 10, just like a one or a two, and then I ask them to kind of get in touch with how they're responding. So if they went from this like super calm state to like describing, like oh you know, like my shoulders are starting to tighten up or my jaw's clenching, or something like that, then I'll take them back to the safe calm state and then, when the exercise is done, the purpose of it is, or part of the purpose of it is to demonstrate look at how much control your brain has over your thought process. So when I do EMDR with people, I say you're not doing the work, I'm not doing the work, your brain is doing the work. So I've had people tell me you know it's a really trippy process and now this is outside my scope.

Speaker 1:

But what's becoming really popular is ketamine-assisted EMDR. I've never heard of that. It's really severe cases, typically People who have very traumatic memories significant we call it in our world C-PTSD, complex PTSD and so you need a doctor, obviously, for the ketamine prescription. They can do it like liposomally in your mouth. Some people will do IV, but you also need a clinician who's trained in EMDR to do the EMDR in conjunction with the doctor who prescribed it.

Speaker 1:

But for anyone who needed resources like that, I would be happy to refer out. And that's something I'm very big on is that if it's outside my scope, I don't touch it, I just say, hey, I'm pretty well networked in this world and I'm happy to refer you to someone else. And I always offer a free 15 minute consult because I want a potential client to get the feel for me, because I'm not for everyone. Um, and then if I'm not for them, my ultimate goal is getting them to someone who is for them. So I'll refer them out and even sometimes, if someone has said that they want to work with me, if they have specific issues, I might say, hey, here are two or three other clinicians where this is their wheelhouse, because I really want them to be sure, and if it's not me that they pick, that's okay too. That's okay.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I feel like it all comes around and ethically, the patient's best interest is what we are supposed to focus on and operate in an ethical manner. So I want them to have choices and they might not know of who else is out there, but I do and if it's something way more significant, like, we'll say, extreme disordered eating, that's not my wheelhouse, even though I'm trained in nutrition that person might need inpatient care. Historically speaking, eating disorders, particularly anorexia, are the most deadly of the mental illnesses. So that's something you want to make sure you get to the right person, and I typically don't treat people with access to disorders like schizophrenia, bipolar things like that. They need med management and there are some therapists who will work in conjunction with their psychiatrist, but typically that's not my demographic.

Speaker 2:

Specialty. Okay, yeah, no, that's good to know. Let's talk about misconceptions. What are some misconceptions people have about holistic health and how do you help clients break through them?

Speaker 1:

I would say the people who are typically drawn to me already have a buy-in. They might already shop at the farmer's market, they might already shop at the health food store, they might already see an integrative alternative doctor. The people who think holistic is too woo-woo, they're not going to be attracted to my practice. And that kind of goes back to what we're talking about. If someone's particular age or the way that they were raised or their cultural background, if it's just there's too much stigma to it, they generally don't even approach me. So I don't have to defend it. I don't know if that's exactly the answer that you were going for, but that's.

Speaker 1:

I just don't really encounter it that much because they're not drawn to me.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and that means that you, you've made it clear about what you specialize in and the type of work that you do, that people who come in they know that and they're looking, actively looking for you because of those purposes, whereas others who are more like, maybe not as open-minded, are like, well, that's not for me, that's fine, I'll go over here. So I think you've made your, you've branded yourself well, where people know like, hey, she's for me, I'm going to give her a call. This is what interests me and I want to give that a try. Thank you, you're welcome. Is there anything I have not touched on that? Perhaps you would like to share, whether it's about yourself, the services you provide, your industry, maybe a fun fact about you. You have the floor.

Speaker 1:

I would just say I mentioned earlier that I'm a certified grief educator and this is something I'm very passionate about because of being close to my grandparents. My grandparents lived to be 102 and 103 years old, I know very lucky and they were married almost 78 years when he died and I helped take care of him and we had professional caregivers and my dad was kind of the point person that I would go out and take care of them as well. And my grandmother passed away in July of 2022. So I went on to take care of her as well. They, my grandmother, passed away in July of 2022. So I went on to take care of her as well. They lived long, happy lives, so it wasn't tragic or premature, but you have, at that point, 40 plus year bond with these people and there was a lot of grief in that, but it was, I would say, what's to be expected.

Speaker 1:

And then, unfortunately for me, my mom despite no family history of colon cancer or cancer at all, for that matter my mom got colon cancer stage three colon cancer and was diagnosed at the beginning of January 2020. And right when the pandemic was descending upon us, she had to have a major surgery in that March and it was like a five-hour surgery and she went on to try to fight this for the next basically three and a half years and ultimately succumbed to it. It turned into something called peritoneal carcinomatosis and died in August of 2023. So that fall I was in my last class on campus in person and it was social justice, and I chose a project for the entire semester about like aid and dying medical aid and dying, dying with dignity and I educated my peers and my professor and myself on medical aid and dying, and a lot of people who are opposed to that are typically have more of a pro-life stance, and I think it's just because they don't understand how it works.

Speaker 1:

And there are only 10 states in this country and the District of Columbia where that's legal. So after I saw what happened to my mom which I knew she would never have wanted to happen I really feel strongly that that's something that needs to be changed in the state of Maryland and, quite frankly, every other state, and if people understood exactly what is in place to prevent it from being abused or misused, I think they'd feel more comfortable about it. But that leads me to the grief, so that, following spring, I decided to take this course with a gentleman by the name of David Kessler, and it's K-E-S-S-L-E-R. He's very well known nationally, and now I'd say it's fair to say internationally, for being an expert in grief. He's like an Oprah's orbit, if that tells you anything.

Speaker 2:

Whoa, okay, he's up there.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So I took this grief educator course and it was very, very helpful and there were three different areas that they were training people for. So they were training people like me who are therapists, who wanted to add the title of certified grief educator to their resume and to be able to help that population. And then there were people who are kind of in adjacent fields. It might be like a pastor or a rabbi or a hospice nurse or I should say a hospice worker or a nurse people like that who also wanted to complement their existing skillset. And then the third group was peers. They wanted to have peer-to-peer educators, people who maybe had lost a child to a drug overdose or had lost a family member to suicide, and his website is just griefcom and they have a sub group called tender hearts where if you have, for example, let's say, you lost your spouse, they don't just have like a support group for widows. It's broken down Like if you're 40 and you lost your husband and you have three kids, your needs and your experience is very different than someone who's like my father, who was 78 when his wife died, is very different than someone who's like my father, who was 78 when his wife died, and so they really try to make sure that they get you dialed into the right support groups when you need that. So I am passionate about making sure that we do a better job in this country, about becoming grief literate, because what I've seen is thoughts and prayers.

Speaker 1:

That's what a lot of people say, or sometimes people say the wrong thing and I know they're well-intentioned, but they might say like God doesn't give you more than you can ask for, or God needed another angel, or at least he's not suffering anymore. Like I said, people are well-meaning, but the person in grief does not want to hear any of those kind of cliche sayings. And I have to say like I'm not ungrateful for all the beautiful flowers that my dad received and my husband and I received, but our house started to turn into what looked like a funeral home and my dad had been caring for his dad, his mom, his mom and my mom, then my mom, for years and it was just like another living thing for him to take care of that was going to die. So you, you have basically this kind of need to reeducate people about how to sit with grief, because the other person doesn't know what to say to you. And then they run the risk of potentially saying the wrong thing and just like showing up and being there and not asking the person like, oh, just let me know if there's anything you need. Well, that person's in grief. They don't need a to-do list to come up with something to tell you to help them, Just show up with a casserole. Or even I heard on a podcast once everyone made dinner for everybody but then they had no breakfast. So they needed breakfast meals.

Speaker 1:

And I was counseling someone once in grief and the person was telling me that there was a neighborhood spreadsheet of who was making what dinner for what night. And then these two families crossed wires and they both brought dinner for that night, and then the family hid the first dinner because they didn't want the second family to feel badly. So here they are in grief, but they're like still worried about everyone else's feelings. Yes, so there's that. And then there's like the professional aspect of it, where your boss or your office or your corporate culture, whatever it is they want you to come back to work. There's very little that I've known of bereavement leave, let alone bereavement pay. Very little that I've known of bereavement leave, let alone bereavement pay.

Speaker 1:

And I think, whether it's at work or in your personal life, people just want you, the person who's grieving, to get back to normal and your normal doesn't exist anymore. So you become someone different and they, you know, don't know exactly what to do with you and it's. This extends well beyond grief in a traditional sense. Like you can have grief because your marriage is falling apart and you're grieving the future that you thought you had with this spouse and this family. Or if you're a person like with what's going on right now with the federal government layoffs, let's say you're very heavily intertwined with your career and you heavily identify with your job, your profession and you've been laid off, then you're like, who am I now? Even the death of pets, you know, sometimes people underestimate, like, how much that companion and the loss of that companion can impact you.

Speaker 1:

So I think that grief manifests in many different ways and even when we were talking earlier about a parent or a partner who didn't show up for you in life the way they should have, whether it's something extreme, where you were verbally abused, emotionally abused, sexually abused, whatever it is or neglected, there's grief for the parent you wished you had and if they're still alive, if they can't change, there's grief for like you wish you had.

Speaker 1:

And if they're still alive, if they can't change, there's grief for like you're still not who I need you to be. So I just I want to support people in grief and I want to kind of spread the word about how to better support those in grief and just even just sitting with them, Like in the Jewish faith they sit Shiva, they go to someone's house, whoever passed away, and they just, you know, sit with them. They might bring in food, they might, I don't know just sit there and knit or play cards or something, but just being with a person and and you can't fix it, so just kind of your presence, be there, yeah, Could be more than than you ever know.

Speaker 2:

Wow, you dropped so many like mics, bombs, whatever you want to call them. Amazing, like so much information, and I agree with a lot of the stuff not to be biased or anything or with anybody on the show, but I love what you said and I resonate with a lot of it and I hope people who listen to this will resonate with it, because there are so many things that happen in our world or society and like just even grief, like the words that you were saying, like oh, um, like even I guess I don't want to go back to that, but I don't know. I hope I'm not being rude, but when you said that when your mom had passed away, and I was just like I'm sorry, cause I do genuinely feel sorry, but maybe I don't know if that was not the right thing, but I honestly feel like with society, like there's certain phrases that we it's kind of like not disingenuous, but it kind of is almost like a switch, like you need to say those things like God doesn't give his silliest clowns the hardest battles. If you, he couldn't, you couldn't handle it or whatever. I think people kind of regurgitate when they hear like the movies or like somebody said that, and it just continues on.

Speaker 2:

But it's not kind of sincere sometimes, just like like when someone holds the door open for you, you say thank you, right, like that's that's great and that's that's great manners, but when great it's grief, people are really dealing with stuff and sometimes that's not what they want to hear.

Speaker 2:

They maybe they need comfort, maybe they didn't have comfort from that person or they felt like that they could have comforted them more, whatever the reason is. But maybe they just need someone. Or maybe they need space, right, but maybe communicating and talking like hey, I'm here for you. If you need me, you can call me, let me know if there's anything I can do, if you need help with whatever cooking a meal or like I can take care of your laundry for you. I understand this time is like really hard for you. I'm here. I don't want to intrude, but I know that I am here and I love that you got to talk about that and so many other things with like health, mental health, nutrition and just I want to thank you so much for coming on here and sharing all of that and wanting to spread that to other people.

Speaker 1:

So Well, it's my pleasure and you were just fine saying that you were sorry. And I will say, in this age of of AI, people can go on chat, gpt, and they can be like what are some things I could say Um, you could look that up, for if you're sending a condolence card or a sympathy card, like what are some sincere words, I think if someone is truly genuine, it does come through. So if someone is disingenuous, that may also come through. But just the fact that you care enough to try to pursue something to help a person, that's what matters. And if someone is lucky enough someone in grief to have a lot of friends or a wide circle or a big community whatever you want to say, a lot of family, they might choose different people to go to for different reasons, like this cousin of mine might make me laugh all the time and I want to see her when I want some levity. And then if I am feeling like I'm going through the six stages of grief because there are six stages to it, david Kessler added the sixth. He was trained by a famous person named Elizabeth Kubler-Ross who wrote the first five stages. He wrote finding meaning. So you might be like in anger, or you might be in sadness or you might be, you know, in different phases. But if I could go to another friend and just be like I'm so angry, why did they, why was my mother taken from me? You know, you have different people for different outlets and they can serve different purposes for you, or someone who's just like a comforting, familiar face, who you might just want to see and watch a movie with, um, that kind of thing. But um, I think, just the effort, the fact that you were talking about, like I want to put forth effort, that that matters a lot.

Speaker 1:

And with we had a neighbor recently, our neighbor of 20 years, and he succumbed to a pancreatic cancer after five years and he was in a trial at Johns Hopkins, which he's the only person I know personally that lived as long as he did with pancreatic cancer. And shortly after he died I brought breakfast burritos in for his wife and child just showed up with the breakfast burritos, because I try to practice what I preach. And then his memorial service was several months later and I showed up that morning at the memorial service and I brought her a wrist corsage and I brought a boutonniere for her, the sun, just so they felt special and like they could look down or at the wrist or at their, at his chest, and think like of their dad. Just those are the kinds of things I mean, like just do something.

Speaker 2:

Yes, I agree, I love it again. Thank you so much and it's been a pleasure having you here and I'm glad that you decided to be a guest here.

Speaker 1:

I'm glad to have been invited. Thank you for your time and your interest and I really appreciate you listening. Absolutely, we did it. We did it. Do you want me to take this?