[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted small business podcast host. I'm here with Kinsey Morgan and we're going to talk about therapy. We're going to talk about her business, understand her approach to psychology, and understand her understanding. So, Kenzie, what's your background and what brought you into your field? [00:00:22] Speaker B: Loaded question. A little bit. I think we all have a little story or two of benefiting from therapy at some point in her life. Most people who get into this field have a reason for it. So my reason probably started a long time ago in high school and seeking counseling for bullying and some family stuff that was going on at the time. So it really, though, was so impactful, so impactful. The therapist I worked with was phenomenal and really worked with teens extremely well. There's a lot of sitting with teens, notoriously so. And so it, her work and our work together kind of pole bolted me into this world of psychology. Once I got to college, I fell in love with the subject matter. A lot of my professors actually had private practices as well as being a professor at the university that I was with. So they talked from a perspective, first person perspective, on what they were learning, what their clients were coming in with, how best to help them, and they spoke with such passion about it that it really ignited a huge love for the subject and curiosity about that. It's very unique in the way that we are all part of psychology, walking around in bodies every day, and we are the subject matter, so we get to kind of study ourselves and other people at the same time. [00:01:57] Speaker A: Tell me about Arise Counseling. I believe that's. How new is that? How long have you been established? What's your approach, what you want people to know about your counseling services? [00:02:13] Speaker B: So I started Arise Counseling about eight, maybe even nine years ago now, and maybe only a couple of years out of graduate school. So I was trying to get my hours and working a lot of different. In a lot of different roles other places at the same time as I was building, building Arise Counseling. Throughout that time, I've really, I worked with an array of clientele predominantly focused on. On trauma therapy. So EMDR is a very popular choice, but it's also my preference in working with trauma clients. I work heavily with mood disorders as well, and then grief and loss. [00:02:51] Speaker A: Tell me more about emdr. What does that acronym stand for? And what are some of the fundamentals that somebody coming in from the outside who may not be familiar with therapy, what, how exactly does that approach align with the needs of somebody who's been through a Traumatic event. [00:03:13] Speaker B: So EMDR stands for eye movement desensitization, Reprocessing, and to put it in more layman's terms. And the way I describe it to clients, if you've ever, you know, those of us who are parents have a child and we watch them sleep sometimes, sometimes. And their eye movements are going back and forth in REM sleep. That is their brain categorizing their day, logging things away into long term memory, basically organizing everything. And so what we aim to do with EMDR is with these traumatic memories, they get stuck. So normally they get stuck in the fight or flight part of our brain. And what happens with that is we then develop triggers that impede, for some people, impede their entire functioning in their day to day life. So the aim and goal of EMDR is to basically recreate the bilateral stimulation of REM sleep while you're awake and remembering and recalling these memories. And in doing so, what we're in essence wanting to do is we're wanting to turn down the brightness of the impact of those memories. So I also kind of use an analogy of being outside of a movie theater and you're seeing all the movie posters. And when you have a traumatic memory, your brain remembers kind of a snapshot of that memory. And I want you to think about maybe the brightness of that movie poster. It's hurtful to look at. Anytime you look at it or even go near it, it is a little bit blinding. So think of EMDR as sort of your button or your dimmer switch to dim down the brightness of that memory so that we can look at it, examine it, walk ourselves through it emotionally, and not have to live in it every day with the hurt and the pain impeding functioning really makes sense. [00:05:08] Speaker A: I mean, you know, I went through counseling myself after being mugged and having, you know, having gone through that and understanding, you know, how your brain functions, you know, you have your amygdala and it has its basic functions. But though that, you know, fight, flight, freeze and appease, there's more than three. It's not just fight or flight. There's, you know, there's more behaviors that can stem out of that and they can start to apply. You start to apply them to, you know, your relationship and you get, you know, you have the same, realize, oh, hey, I'm having the same freeze response, or the going back to the memory when I'm, you know, in the middle of an argument that I had when I was mugged, and you're like, oh, those are, my brain has associated those Two things. Maybe it's not good to associate my wife with being mugged and maybe that's shutting me down from my higher level reasoning and logic, you know. [00:06:10] Speaker B: Yeah, and that's a great, such a good example. And for most of us, if we really were to trace it even back further, we have a biological temperament that sometimes leans toward one or the other or occasionally oscillates between both. And by both I mean two different, you know, two different options. So yeah, most people find themselves in these moments where it's impacting their relationships and maybe even job satisfaction. How they relate to authority and you know, how they actually function in their day to day is significantly impacted. And for most of my clients, if you were to trace it back to childhood, that they can, we can kind of see a pattern start to emerge. Because what the brain does is it learns the quickest way route. I mean that's kind of the whole, the whole design, it will start short circuiting to the quickest route in order to keep us safe. And, and it does that because it's wanting to really protect itself. It's very self protecting in that way. So yeah, the brain will start to create new neural pathways and start associating things that even, even remotely look like it, sound like it, feel like it as basically being back in that memory. [00:07:35] Speaker A: Got it. So then the EM pathway pathways that you're trying to build, you're having them re explore those painful memories, but in a different context so that you can create more pathways around it and disconnect those shortcuts, give a different context for that memory and associate it with something else or make it not as primary. Is basically the objective, right? [00:08:08] Speaker B: Basically, yes. The beauty part about EMDR as well, as opposed to traditional talk therapy, is I have found traditional talk therapy, although very effective in its own right, it usually takes a longer amount of time. So I kind of think of it like a corkscrew a little bit. You go forward and you go back a little bit and you go forward a little bit more and back a little bit. With emdr, I think of it more like a laser. It laser focuses on the unprocessed emotional ramifications of whatever memory someone is bringing up. So I've had, you know, clients with all kinds of different, different types of trauma, work related trauma, natural disasters, childhood trauma, sexual trauma, all kinds of things. But it works the same way. It's very interesting in that way, but it's like a laser pointer that goes directly to the either belief and, or emotions that are attached to that memory. [00:09:11] Speaker A: So tell me a little bit more about some of the other services or the other approaches you use and your therapy services. I know you said you work with a lot of trauma. What are some of the other channels or methodologies that you use in your practice? [00:09:26] Speaker B: So I use, kind of. Most people are a little bit eclectic, but one of the things that I definitely use a lot of is cbt. That's a very common type of talk therapy. And the goal is to basically use your behaviors, thoughts and emotions to, to process whatever you're going through. So that's, that's one very evidence based approach that I use. And then also inner child work, so being able to do more somatic work and inner child work to kind of start visualizing yourself. For some people parenting, like re parenting themselves, learning how to calm themselves, how to regulate, how to actually sit with their own emotions. In our culture, especially in the US we really love to intellectualize our way around things instead of feeling our way through something. And sometimes that pattern can keep people in therapy for a lot longer than they actually need to be. So I do focus a little bit on eft, emotionally focused therapy, so that we actually get to the root cause of why these thoughts or behaviors are continuing to be a path pattern. Talking our way around it usually keeps us in that loop as opposed to going through the pain or through the emotions that, that are actually a part. [00:10:50] Speaker A: Of it that makes sense. So you, you said reparenting. Is that just in situations where you have like an abusive parent? Or is that something where even somebody who has, you know, good parents, quote unquote, like, is it just for, like, oh, I, you know, I was abandoned by one, one parent, or they went through trauma. Or is it something where, you know, just the, the rigors of existence, whatever they may be, lead us to this situation where, you know, we're all, we're, we're supposed to be adults now. I'm 40 and I still turn around like, oh wait, I can't eat chicken pot pies all day. I guess I need to like, parent myself. Like, you know, make good choices, make good decisions. Which I'm leaning towards is probably one more than the other, honestly. [00:11:45] Speaker B: I mean, don't get me wrong, you can use it. I feel you can use it for both. And it's different levels, but it's the same mechanism to speak. So some people, yes, they're needing to reparent from an abusive situation or reparent themselves because of an absent parent. But I've also found that a vast majority of people you know, they'll come in. And most of us, because of our own upbringings, we feel the need to defend our parent, especially if we feel like they were a good parent. And it's this moment of parents are still people and therefore because they're people, they can't always meet every single need. And we get messages from that that then carry over into adulthood. And so what we want is we really want to be able to interact with both sides of that because both can be, can be helpful. And the one thing that I have found, at least that is very challenging for most people that are in like, I would say, Gen X millennial type age range is that we had baby boomer parents. And their parents were usually very stoic. Not always, but primarily they came from a generation that really does remember times when people, unfortunately, especially in the mental health space, those were not our finest fears as middle in the middle world. And so they remember times when you know, you really should not have talked about family stuff outside of the family because it could have literally been dangerous. So it's this moment of cultural generational, kind of generational trauma in a lot of ways, because that meant that they didn't really get the ability usually to learn how to express their emotions as children. They really didn't get to learn how to regulate because everything was very shut down, stuffed down, and let's avoid it. And so then that in turn meant that they couldn't teach what they didn't know. So we now have a lot of studies and studies, especially about raising kids, where the parenting model has definitely changed and shifted for, for a lot of people, the ways that we would discipline has changed and shifted drastically. And therefore a lot of times what I'm actually doing is I'm helping people in that middle bracket and sometimes even older bracket, I'm really helping them re parent themselves so that they can learn how to appropriately express, feel their way through and actually come come out on the other side and letting go of whatever is holding them back. So to answer your question in a very roundabout way, it's both and it's a both and which is a lot of what I do. [00:14:44] Speaker A: Honestly, that makes sense. Is there kind of a trend or something new in your field that you've found has been useful? That's come out in the past few years since something that, you know, you've been doing this for at least 10 years. Is there anything new in terms of research or trends or fads or insights that have come out that have really allowed you to unlock something or Provide a new, different approach or spin on these therapies, services. [00:15:22] Speaker B: Yeah. So one thing that really comes to mind for me is the simple traumatic experience. And what I mean by that is emotions that we don't deal with, usually our body tends to take over. So they come out in different physical ailments and sometimes even in health, in the health space, diseases and things later on in life. So, for example, there are a lot of people dealing with a of lot, lot of autoimmune issues. And they. There's definitely a link between people that struggle with opening up and expressing their emotions and actually getting that out of their body. They sometimes have this trajectory where they end up, where they end up later on in life developing different types of diseases and usually in the autoimmune space because of shutting down those emotions and stuffing them down. Our body is extremely smart in that way, and it takes that and it goes, okay, well, if you're not going to process this and get it out, then I am going to harbor it. It's kind of the body keeps a score mentality. [00:16:32] Speaker A: So it's fascinating. I must have missed that episode of the Magic School Bus where our mindset and mentality and our ability to cope with our world became a disease factor. I just remember, you know, the little boy being upset that they were fighting germs inside somebody's body. But having, you know, a cartoonified, like, understanding of these things. I think, culturally, how are you seeing the acceptance of needing therapy of, you know, the stigma that you mentioned, obviously, like in the 30s, like, you know, you're get Kennedy and you're going, you know, get a spike into the forehead if you come forward with your emotional difficulties. We're very far from that. But we're also not, you know, like, there's kind of a boomerang of maybe too, when we went too far. So how are you seeing the. The current play out of culture, acceptance of therapy, maybe tropes that are difficult, that make work more difficult for you? What are your thoughts on that area? [00:17:39] Speaker B: Goodness. Well, luckily to your point, luckily, you know, the culture is definitely shifting into a more acceptable, you know, more accepting of mental health and sometimes more accepting in the way of, like, we're utilizing the mentality of we go to the gym for our physical exercise, we go to the doctor for, you know, our physical health. We go to the dentist to make sure checkups. And I think some of the younger generation are kind of saying, well, why don't we do that for mental health? It doesn't really make a whole Lot of sense we're trying to kind of cope with life all the time. So why wouldn't we have check ins or moments where we come in and just process with someone? So that's a very promising thing to see because most of the older generations, there's definitely a lot of bias. I think most people are afraid and sometimes, you know, it's afraid of their own stuff and afraid to actually go towards the things that are scary. And that's normal human being, you know, it's a normal human thing. But there's luckily a lot of shifting happening. But you're right, it's not quite as much as maybe we might think. We like to think we're very far away from what was going on back then and in a lot of ways we are. But the stigma that is still there I think comes from a very long history of, you know, it not being safe for, for a long time. [00:19:11] Speaker A: One other factor I wanted to bring up and see what your opinion and approach to this was in your business. And my wife, she said she's usually not, you know, she's very conservative in certain ways, but she said she really believes that if, you know, we set everything aside and said, you know what, mental health care, not drugs, you know, not psychiatric in assigning, you know, drugs that should be paid, if, you know, therapy, mental health services were 100% free for 100% of Americans immediately accessible all of the time, then how much greater would our health and wellness be as a country? So I was wondering if you would address accessibility, being able to get in and work with an individual therapist like you. How do you handle that in your business, handle client health? The insurance processes can be, have been confusing, onerous paper trail, nightmare at different times. So how do you navigate that with your clients and how do you see that playing out on the national scale? [00:20:18] Speaker B: So, so many factors involved with that, with that question for sure. The way that I handle it is I do not take any insurance primarily because I don't have a team of people to be able to vouch for all of my clients and not enough hours in the day to do so. As a one woman show, most of the time agency work will take, will take insurance. Not all agencies do. Sometimes they will offer sliding scale resources for people which those, I cannot tell you how important those are to the accessibility factor of mental health. I think any therapist you talk to is going to want it always to be more accessible because that's part of the, that's definitely part of the obstacles that we face for sure and most people that are in the private sector, like I am, we don't have the ability and the means to be able to vouch for all of the people that we. That we see all the time. And I think sometimes people don't realize as well that when you're having to. When you're billing insurance, you are having to also diagnose. So in order to get reimbursed or anything like that, it has to come with a diagnosis. So if someone is, for example, coming in with grief and loss, they might not 100% fit a depressant diagnosis, for example, because they're dealing with grief, they're not necessarily dealing with depression. So it's this moment of, where do I classify you if you don't meet all the criteria? And I can't vouch for that if you don't meet all the criteria. And then you get into this really weird space of. I don't want to label somebody with a label that's going to last in their history with their insurance company because occasionally that can be detrimental for them in a financial sense. So the way that I usually handle it is on the. On the initial phone call with anyone, I am very upfront about cost, and then I'm also advocating for them as well. So if they're. If their financial situation prohibits them from being able to see me, then I am very adamant. And I feel it's my ethical duty to make sure to connect them with someone who can meet their financial need. Because that is, especially in this economy, so important, so important. So we want to make sure that. I want to make sure that everybody is connected with who they're supposed to. To be with. For sure. [00:22:44] Speaker A: Makes sense what challenge that people are facing. Do you think that your services and therapies helps the most? [00:22:57] Speaker B: With most of my clients, it's. It's functioning. They. They end because. Because they put off usually going to therapy until their functioning is inhibited. I've seen in the past couple of years a huge, huge rise and probably due to Covid and all of the ups and downs with occupational issues and shifts and things, honestly, a huge rise in workplace trauma. And so from where I'm standing, a lot of the time, it's these obstacles of I'm needing to be able to keep this job. I'm needing to be able to. To actually do what I'm hired to do. And I'm having trouble holding boundaries. I'm having trouble with work life balance of any kind. And it's robbing me of my ability to have life satisfaction. And so they feel usually like they're stuck between a rock and a hard place. And they need a place to process that openly that they're not worried about any sort of pain pushback, to practice the skills that we talk about in therapy in a safe place so that when they go out into the world they're able to then practice on what I consider to be a much harder audience for those of us in our personal lives, the people we love the most, our supervisors at work, there's lots of different relationships that usually are needing to have a little bit of a shift in and that's usually why they're there in my office in the first place. But it's a great training ground. [00:24:33] Speaker A: That's actually something that I hadn't thought about. But it's true. We spend a lot of time, a large chunk of our lives in relationships with third party people in high stress, potentially scenarios. But I think there's this kind of. It genuinely didn't occur to me that hey, you know, that might like the workplace pressures might be a good reason to go get therapy and that it might be a source of trauma and difficulty that you're dealing with. But that's kind of our, a lot of our life like you know, for some people, whether it's a high stress sales situation or whether you're like working yourself to, to the bone in the field in a service industry, you know, even, you know, now that I think about my brother who like he's like an iron worker, you know, he's tying rebar, like he's still dealing with like a lot of workplace stress where, you know what, maybe having a conversation about that and having an approach to unwind some of those difficulties might be a good thing for you to consider. I honestly had hadn't like when you think of the cause of oh, you know, you're going to therapy because you had a loss or you know, the traumatic, you know, work's a part of life that's a fairly big part of it. [00:26:00] Speaker B: It's a huge chunk. I think people, a lot of times they don't think about that as being the majority of the time that we spend throughout the week is at work. It's spent at work. So if our work orbits and our, and our work environment isn't a healthy environment and usually the worker is not the one in charge of the environment because there's a power differential. So it's usually the company or whoever you're working for, they're in charge of the environment and the Worker is sort of like, if you wanted to look at it like a family, mom and dad are in charge of the home environment, and the kids are sort of the. Just the byproduct of whatever the environment at home is usually. And so we're very similar mindset to that. And we spend the majority of our time there. And I think it's a very overlooked, very overlooked source of contention for a lot of people. And with, like I said with COVID a lot of people come working from home and then going back into the office or having a hybrid situation for the first time. People were really struggling with that, with that shift. And we saw obviously a huge, huge increase in. In clientele, I think, during. Obviously during that time. So it was a hard time for a lot of people. But what people really didn't realize is that Covid also took away a lot of their coping. So the strategies that they would usually use for coping, going out with friends and connecting and going to a baseball game or a concert or whatever, to be able to kind of unwind, they no longer had those options. And so now we're seeing people go back out, out into the workforce and be able to go out again, which is great. But we also have not been used to that for a couple of years. And so the stress that builds with that is it can be very. I mean, it can halt people in their tracks. It really can. Because it's definitely different going into an office versus being at home. [00:28:00] Speaker A: I think it's probably a lot safer talking to you than trying to talk to hr. Because, folks, HR is not there for you. They are to put. Protect the company. They are not looking out for your mental health, your well, well being, except for where the company might be monetarily liable for such. So Kinsey's a much better ally than Pam in hr. [00:28:23] Speaker B: Couldn't agree more. Bias, I guess, but I could not agree more. I do have that conversation, though, with a lot of people that have, you know, tried to reach out to their HR representative or have tried that route. And I think that's part of where the frustration comes from for a lot of people is that they vocalized it or they felt like they have vocalized it to a supervisor, or they've tried to vocalize it to hr and then they have negative consequences that sort of arise from that. And I think that's part of the huge frustration. And I think why some people reach out to someone like me to actually have that be safe and protected so that they can go over how they'd like to handle it, and the emotions that come from the trauma response of it all, they can process it in a safe way so that when they are taking it to hr, if they want to, then it's this moment of I am regulated, I am able to stay regulated. I am able to communicate my needs effectively. And because I'm able to stay regulated doing so, there's sometimes a better response to that. [00:29:34] Speaker A: Yeah, that makes sense. So as we kind of wrap up here, I usually like to give like a takeaway. You know, I hate to like condense mental health theory down to like one digestible thing. Go do this one thing to make yourself better. But let's go ahead and say, if there were something or a path to start down, what would you recommend an actionable thing somebody could do? After listening to this interview, I have. [00:30:02] Speaker B: Found that with my clients, it really comes down to asking yourself and in actual introspection about what areas of life you might want to shift or change. If there's an area that you find that you do feel like, man, I'm just not very satisfied with this particular area. I encourage people, obviously I'm very partial, but I encourage people to make sure to reach out to somebody, to actually talk that through. Because most of the time there is at least one area of people's lives that if they were really honest with themselves, they'd want it shifted in some way. Whether it be, I'm wanting to really be able to express myself effectively. I'm wanting to increase intimacy in my marriage. I'm wanting to really work on relationship with my children and making sure as they're aging and shifting into these new territories that I'm able to keep up. It's just so many different parts of that that really come into play. So I would say start with introspection, seeing if there's anything that you feel like you'd want to work on. And then it all starts with a phone call. And I will say that phone call is the hardest phone call that most people have to make. But on the other end of it is usually a therapist that is really ready and willing to work with somebody. I definitely take it as a passion of mine and come from a strengths based approach and really want my clients to know that they all have inherent strengths. We just have to find them and utilize them. So I think that would be, that would be where I would start for sure. [00:31:38] Speaker A: That makes sense. And just to get one last clarification, and you mentioned relationships, but you, you mostly focus on individual therapy, one on one, and not necessarily Like a couple's relationship or multi person therapy. Correct? [00:31:55] Speaker B: Correct. Yes. My specialty is an individual therapy. But one of the things that I love about it is that most people will come in and they think that they're only working on what they bring to the table. And they are in a lot of ways. But if you change one part of a system, the whole system has to shift. And I love that aspect because it's this moment of, okay, if something is breaking down, let's understand our own role in it. Let's be able to show up differently, see how that changes the system. If you're able to show up differently, if you're able to regulate yourself, if, you know, if maybe your fights, for example, with a spouse or something have been escalated a lot of the time, or we're yelling back and forth or we're dysregulated, well, what could happen if your role in that shifted? Would that soften the interaction itself? So yes, I work with individuals, but I also find that usually when they work on things that they have to do, it changes the whole system. [00:32:57] Speaker A: Yeah. And sometimes it's also, you know what, I change this and it's still a major problem. So the problem is actually my boundaries are being violated. And so there's behaviors, whether that's mother in laws that are stepping over turf that doesn't belong them, inappropriate enmeshment and integration in family. I'm sure in the south there's absolutely nothing wrong with family issues that you're dealing with. [00:33:25] Speaker B: Of course not. Of course not. Yeah, no, that's a great, that's a great thing to notice as well because yeah, you're absolutely right. There's so many different factors to consider and sometimes it is boundary work. I work with boundaries all the time. All the time. And those are different with personal life in law, relationships and work related boundaries. So yeah, boundaries are a big one for sure. [00:33:51] Speaker A: The boundary for us is the end of the episode. I'm going to make sure that your site is linked in the show notes. Anybody that's listening can find more information about you say clearly the name of your business again, where you're located and some basic information about you so we can make sure to connect. [00:34:09] Speaker B: So again, Kenzie Morgan and I am the owner of Arise Counseling Services in Brentwood. And so if you, if anyone is trying to, to locate us, we are at a therapy space in Brentwood. So I am very excited to work with someone. [00:34:25] Speaker A: Thank you so much for your time. Bye bye.