Batten House Podcast
Batten House Podcast
Batten House Podcast
Ep 9 When Sitting With Grief Becomes Your Life's Mission
Tina's journey to founding MindSpa Mental Health Centre exemplifies courage in the face of overwhelming obstacles. After discovering her passion for psychology, she found herself stuck in an unfulfilling government job that left her struggling to even get out of bed each morning. At 30, with two young children, Tina made the bold decision to pursue a Master's in counseling – only to receive her acceptance letter while her husband lay in a coma following surgical complications.
Her story unfolds as a powerful testament to perseverance as she navigated full-time work, full-time studies, and caring for both her children and recovering husband. "If it's not life or death, it's not that big a deal," Tina reflects, sharing how facing true crisis gave her perspective to take calculated risks in building her life's work. This philosophy eventually led her to partner with Michelle to create MindSpa, a unique mental health center designed to feel like "taking care of yourself" rather than clinical treatment.
MindSpa offers a comprehensive approach to mental wellness through psychotherapy, psychological assessments, and innovative neurofeedback technology. Tina particularly highlights neurofeedback as a breakthrough for clients experiencing seemingly contradictory symptoms like simultaneous depression and anxiety. By examining brainwave patterns, practitioners can identify specific areas of over or under-production and tailor treatments to regulate different parts of the brain independently – something medications cannot accomplish.
Beyond clinical innovations, Tina challenges the persistent stigma around therapy, emphasizing that seeking support isn't an admission of something "wrong," but rather a resourceful approach to processing life's complexities. "You don't fix grief, you sit with it," she explains, highlighting how professional guidance can be particularly valuable when friends and family are experiencing their own parallel grief journeys. Ready to experience a different approach to mental wellness? Visit MindSpa at www.themindspa.ca with locations in both East and West Ottawa.
He was the one who was like apply, apply anywhere, we'll go anywhere. We need to go for you to go to school. This is your passion, you want to do this. He was willing to make any sacrifice.
Speaker 2:This is the Batten House Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbours come together. Here's your host, sean Batten.
Speaker 3:Hello everyone. We are here with Tina from MindSpa. Hello Tina, how are you Good? How are you? I'm good. Thanks, listen, tell the viewers what you do in our community.
Speaker 1:Absolutely so. We're MindSpa Mental Health Centre, so we do psychotherapy and neurofeedback primarily and we also are able to do psychological and psychiatric assessments. We also are able to do psychological and psychiatric assessments. So we have a nurse practitioner on staff, we have a psychologist, a child psychologist on staff, we have social workers, we have psychotherapists and we do neurofeedback is a huge area that we work in as well.
Speaker 1:So we try a very holistic approach and our name is very much the vibe that we want to give when people walk in, that it feels like you're taking care of yourself. This is a moment of self-care, this is a moment of relaxation, this is to come and feel better. While also we work with in a collaborative care model with a psychiatry company called psychotherapy matters and it actually helps people get diagnosis, at least with partial coverage by OHIP, and then the other part is often covered by people's extended health benefits, but at a lot lower cost than a full psychological assessment, which can be in the multiple thousands of dollars we can usually get it, usually get it under 1500 and sometimes even under a thousand dollars.
Speaker 3:It's, it's it's so needed these days and and it's it sounds like it's so accessible. Uh, what you're doing there? Um, I love that. What, what's? How did you get involved? Like, tell us about your journey.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I can tell you, I started out in undergrad. I was actually a law major year one, and it was funny because you have to take a bunch of different courses, and so I took first year psych, first year sociology and first year law and all that, and the only class I hated was law. I literally would fall asleep. As soon as I get a textbook in front of my face, I would fall asleep.
Speaker 3:Probably not the uh, the direction you want to go.
Speaker 1:No, not when you can't stay awake. Where psychology? On the other hand, I was just like it was a page turner for me. I found it really, really fascinating. So I was luckily easily able to switch into psychology. Um, as soon as I finished my undergrad, I did two years in the research department at Carleton. I worked as a research assistant for a couple of years and then life sort of started to happen. I met my husband, had a couple of kids and got into the government sort of swing of things. Very backwards too.
Speaker 1:I was a. I was a publication editor for a scientific journal Very accidentally, where you get that three month contract and all of a sudden it turns into this job that I was ill suited for and ill educated for, and so that was not. That was such a horrible fit for me and I it really was that closest feeling to depression I've ever heard where I would have to just convince myself. You just got to just just open your eyes. That's all you got to do. Just just sit myself. You just got to just just open your eyes. That's all you got to do. Just just sit up, just walk to the shower. That's all you have to do, because I found that job was such a poor fit for me and so when I had two kids I already had two kids I was 30.
Speaker 1:It was it would have been 2012. I think I to ottawa u for their psychotherapy or their masters of education for counseling. At the time, we weren't even a regulated profession yet. So I graduated in 2014 and we became a regulated profession in 2015. And so I went to school without knowing am I going to meet their requirements for this regulation, because we don't even know what it's going to be yet. And it was actually quite it was. It was quite a difficult decision at the time when I decided to go back to school because I had applied for school and shortly after I applied, my husband had to was just having a day surgery. He had Crohn's disease and he had to have a bowel resection, and so what that means is they just kind of cut out a piece and they put it back together. But unfortunately, that surgery didn't go well and he actually ended up almost passing away and he was in the ICU for three weeks. He was in the hospital for six and while he was in a coma I had I got my acceptance letter into school.
Speaker 3:It's one in three years old. Wow, yeah, that's heavy. That's a lot, of, a lot of stuff thrown at you.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Wow.
Speaker 1:And I had to make. I had to make a decision. And it's interesting because I would not be doing this today, but for him, because he was the one who was like apply, apply to London, apply anywhere, we'll go anywhere. We need to go for you to go to school. You hate your job, this is your passion, you want to do this. He was willing to make any sacrifice. So I'm sitting there going. I know what he'd say If I could ask him do I do this or do I not? I know what he would say, but also I don't know what's going to happen here. And so, luckily, I thought about it and I thought well, I can accept this and then I can defer or cancel my acceptance later.
Speaker 1:It's April, doesn't start till September and so I did accept the offer and miracles of miracles, by September he was feeling well enough that he could. He could watch the kids, at least while I went to school, but I worked full time during school. I went to school full time, I didn't do a part-time. They didn't have a part-time option. So that's where it was lucky that I was doing the job that I was doing in scientific publication, cause we just had monthly deadlines that I had to like well and I got to work remotely. So between being able to work remotely, but again we had at this point they were probably closer to two and four- that's a busy household yeah, Absolutely.
Speaker 1:And so I was the household cleaner, the cook, the nurse caretaker, the child caretaker, the full-time worker and the full-time student when I went to school.
Speaker 3:Well, I, I honor you for having the courage to make such a change, um, because many, many of us have been in the position where we're in a job or a career that doesn't fit Um, but it's. It's a lot of times easier just to stay the course Right, especially as you become a wife and a mother, father and so on. And so, taking that change, especially with the health you know your, your health situation or your husband's at the time I honor you for taking that leap and obviously that's worked out, yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, I appreciate that. I feel like it's it is. It is a very actually freeing thing sometimes to face certain things, because nothing's as bad as that. So any sort of risk that you take, you go. Well, it's not life or death, and so it's not life or death.
Speaker 1:It's short and we don't have it guaranteed and I thought I could stay because it had a pension, it had benefits. It also had a ceiling for me because I had a psych background in a scientific world. So I knew this is as high as I'm ever going to get here, so I'm going to have to change careers anyway if I want more and so and it's hard to get, it was hard to get into that program, I can't lie it was hard to get in.
Speaker 1:I thought this is it's kind of now or never. If I don't do this, I will probably never do it.
Speaker 3:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:And yeah, it was, and I I even got pregnant with my third, cause I have four kids. I got pregnant with my third while I was doing the program because we wanted to expand our family and our two first were getting older and we thought we were you know, we knew we wanted more than two and so we didn't want a massive gap. They'd feel so outside from their sisters.
Speaker 3:We felt the same. We felt the exact same way and it's funny when life, life hits you like that and you're like I want you know, I would love to be fortunate enough to have multiple children, you know, above two or three or four in our case, we really wanted four, but then you have the life. You know you have life that happens and you have the career changes and health and all these decisions to make and you have young ones and so on and so forth, and it gets really hectic, really crazy, and it takes a lot of um, well, it takes a lot of you guys being a partnership to know, each other really well, especially through a crisis, a health crisis like that, and uh, and to be able to persevere.
Speaker 3:and now, here you are.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and stronger than ever, and that's the thing. I see other relationships and I go, I, I, I feel, I feel bad for people that don't have the right partner, um, because I know how it literally changes the entire outcome of your life. You have that supportive person, um, and luckily I know that this type of thing can actually break people, and for us, that made us stronger and we feel like we can just kind of take on anything, cause again, it's not if it's not life or death, like you've been there right, exactly, and it's not that big a deal If we, if we went broke tomorrow and had to start all over again, because we did.
Speaker 1:At one point we decided to go to the U? S after I graduated school, um, for some warmer, for the warmer temperatures, and we lived in Savannah Georgia for a year. And that didn't go well.
Speaker 3:It's a beautiful space, beautiful space to be, but yeah.
Speaker 1:We highly recommend a visit there. But yeah, but, but then you know we we learned a lot from that of taking, like you, just kind of got to go for it sometimes and then we always said he got to pivot sometimes. And that's why my partner and I Michelle who, who runs Mindspa with me we're always like we just pivot. If that's not going to, if that's not working, we're just going to pivot.
Speaker 3:So so you've been in Mindspa for how many years now?
Speaker 1:Okay, so we opened our doors August 2023.
Speaker 3:So spa for how many years now? Okay, so we opened our doors august 2023, so not even two years yet. Yeah, nice so, but you're coming up to your two-year mark yeah, yeah, that's awesome and it was so it's.
Speaker 1:it's been so exciting the whole, the whole way around, very, very uh. Michelle and I had actually worked together at another location, but it was actually very close to covid and we ended up not really getting to know each other because of that. Of course, everybody was either online or in their offices with their masks on, not really hanging out much, and but we knew of each other and then we sat down at the owl the owl cafe. It's on over in there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's a beautiful little spot.
Speaker 1:So beautiful, so it'll hold a a special place in my heart. That was the first time we sat down and had a conversation about this concept and we really um. For us, we're very. The way we look at it is. We want to create a space where both clinicians and clients can really thrive, find a home there, find a place where they just feel comfortable taking care of that. We're always going to go that extra mile Because even for us, if you come in and you're a new client and you're saying I'm looking for services and we go, we don't think that we have what you need. We're going to try to find you in the community what you need, and not just a name, but someone that we know has availability right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we don't want to send you off into the ether where you're still actually just not sure where to go. And so that's why having community partnerships with other, with other therapists in the community is really important to us, because we want to be able to know where we might be sending people if we're not a good fit for them. That's right, cause we, we really absolutely I mean mental health is in it's not in a good fit for them.
Speaker 3:that's right, um, because because we, we really absolutely I mean, mental health is in, it's not in a good place. That's right. Um, absolutely, and actually. That brings me to my next, my next question um, now, you've been in the industry for a while and you know that, um, there's lots of myths and misconceptions. Um, tell us about one you know. Choose one that you a myth or misconception that you hear in your industry that you'd like to address?
Speaker 1:I would say I would say probably that there has to be something wrong with you in order to go to therapy or benefit from therapy, because I think that it's still considered. If someone says I think maybe you should go to therapy, that's considered an insult still, and I'm glad for it to not be an insult, that it's more just a recognition of you could benefit from talking this through with someone who's going to be able to listen in a way that a lot of other people struggle to and support in a way that that other people in your life are maybe not able to do. Grief is a great example of it, where, very often, if someone's experiencing grief, their circle of care is also experiencing it, because how often is it I have a loss that nobody else in my life is also experiencing, and so, and when you try to get support from people who are also going through that grief process, it can get messy.
Speaker 3:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:It's a very complicated process and people can be in these different stages of it. And if you have two people, let's say, a very common stage of it is denial Right and the other one is, let's say, depression. If you have someone in denial talking to someone in depression, as you can imagine, that's not necessarily going to feel like a very supportive conversation who also don't necessarily know that they're in denial or that they're in a depressive state or so on.
Speaker 3:right, absolutely. But but have the best intentions, yes, because they love you, they're a friend of yours or a family member, and so on, but don't necessarily have the skills to, you know, get, get a little deeper um, to be able to help you in the way that you need to be helped at that time, at that moment, right, necessarily.
Speaker 1:And it's funny on that topic too. It's like a lot of people want you to feel better. If you're sad and you're, people want to make you feel better, and if you actually ask anyone who's going through a traumatic loss, you say how many people have said things to you that were very unhelpful in the attempt to make you feel better? Most people will say, yeah, a handful today said this thing to me in this attempt to make me feel better, but it actually made me feel worse. Yeah.
Speaker 3:With all, all, with all the good intentions, but great intentions yeah but we learn.
Speaker 1:You don't fix grief, you sit with grief, you learn to not actually avoid it, because that's basically what's going to create. A bigger problem is actually avoiding grief.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, I love that you don't, uh, fix grief, you sit with it. Yeah, I love that you don't fix grief, you sit with it. That's very powerful. I, I love that. I, I got to head over to your space and see you, see, you guys, that's I love what you're doing. That's incredible. For so, for you, when you're not doing this, not in work mode with your kids.
Speaker 1:What do you do? What do you do for fun? That is a very good question. I one of my favorite things to do when I am not in work mode would definitely be spending time with friends. I love spending time with my family. I love social. I'm an extrovert by nature and so for me, people fill up my, my bucket of energy and so but one of my very favorite things to do my best friend she lives in Toronto, she's a, she was, she was actually a retired psychologist, you know helps other clinicians like me grow group practices.
Speaker 1:Actually, um, and her and I, twice a year, we go to a place called grail springs in bancroft and it's this incredible place where it's. It's on a lake and it's got a whole spa in it, but it's a lot of just uh, they have this great room with this amazing fireplace and these comfy couches and you read and you relax and you eat very healthy, which I'm a picky eater but I cause. They have, I don't know, an amazing chef. It's a whole vegan vegan thing and I'm like I can eat this. I don't know it tastes good, especially in a place like.
Speaker 3:Bancroft. It's a beautiful landscape.
Speaker 1:It's so and and there's, it almost feels like it has this whole other energy. I remember going to New York city and feeling like a time square has this whole experience of energy in it, and and Bancroft has a similar energy, but in this in a peaceful way.
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 1:Invigorating.
Speaker 3:Invigorating yeah.
Speaker 1:And so I just I like to connect with, with, with nature. I like to self-reflect. I like to connect with nature. I like to self-reflect, I like to learn. I'm just insatiable. I like to learn, I like to grow. I hope to get to the end of my career. I hope to get to the end of my life and go. There was so much more to learn. There were so many more ways to grow and get better and just um, just continue to, to evolve. So that's definitely the stuff that I'm looking for whenever I'm not working.
Speaker 3:That's awesome. What? What an awesome life. Giving approach to life, that's, that's just great. Um. So, for our listeners, what's one thing? Um you'd like them to know about your business specifically?
Speaker 1:I would say probably the neuro feedback piece. I think that a lot of people know what therapy is and what assessments are, but the neuro feedback piece. Because for us, what I've noticed over time and working with neuro feedback is that a lot of people can get stuck in therapy and they're not sure why they're stuck. And if we actually take a look at the brain, very often we're like oh there it is, that's what sucks. So with neurofeedback we actually look at the brainwave activity and we look at what people, the areas that people might be overproducing certain brainwaves or underproducing other brainwaves, because very often I could be over producing some brain waves in one part of my brain and under producing in another part, which is why you can actually have a lot of symptoms that are confusing, that are sort of these don't? They shouldn't go together. I'm exhausted all the time but I can't sleep. What, what? How am I exhausted all the time but I can't sleep? You'd think I'd be able to sleep all the time if I'm exhausted all the time, but I can't sleep.
Speaker 1:You'd think I'd be able to sleep all the time, if I'm exhausted all the time, or there's a lot of people out there who experience both depression and anxiety, but if they take a medication it will fix one and make the other one worse, and they're like I don't understand. Why is it that I always just have to play between either feeling depressed or anxious or both, but it's never both go away. And very often if we look at the brainwave activity, we can actually see there's just a lot of different stuff happening in the left hemisphere versus the right hemisphere, and medication works on the whole brain maybe not the whole brain, there's some that just work on the front and that type of stuff, but it's always going to be working on both sides of the brain. We don't have any medication that only works on the right.
Speaker 3:Okay.
Speaker 1:Only works on the left. And so for us we can actually tailor a treatment that we can do one specific treatment on the right side of your brain and do something completely different on the left side of your brain to actually be able to resolve both symptoms with the same treatment. And so, but that's basically, at the end of the day, what neurofeedback is is we look at your brain, see what you're overproducing, what you're underproducing, and then we train the brain to reduce what what's too high and bring up what's too low to help regulate the brain. And when the brain is regulated, the nervous system gets regulated, your mood gets regulated.
Speaker 3:Um, oh, I. I have so many more questions for you, so we're going to have to have you back because it's so much so much more to dive into Um but for uh, for our, our listeners right now. How can they find you? How can they get ahold of you guys?
Speaker 1:I would definitely say our website's the easiest way to get ahold of us wwwthemindspaca Because you can see all of our clinician profiles on there, you can see the treatment options that we have, and then all of our contact information is on there as well. We have two locations now, so we're in the West end and the East end, right off transit, which is really nice. So, yeah, that's great.
Speaker 3:Well, listen. Thank you for your time. I know you're a busy entrepreneur and mother and wife and awesome community member, so I appreciate your time, appreciate you and we'll talk again.
Speaker 1:Okay, thank you so much, sean.
Speaker 2:Thanks for listening to the Batten House podcast. To nominate a favourite local business to be featured on the show, go to battenhousepodcastca. That's battenhousepodcastca.
