Dr. Jaimee has been a vital part of our team and her expertise is deeply valued. Below, you'll get some insights into one of the most important aspects of our mental health: healing. As I mentioned last month, these insights are a new feature for our recently designed newsletter, and only appear here.

If you feel like your friends or family would benefit from them, please feel free to share it with them. I hope you and your family have continued health and mental wellness.

Hey folks, Mike here! This month, I sat down with Rachel Holloway, one of the newest members of our team, to discuss how clients can attempt to find balance in their lives.

I look at it like this: you're a very successful person at meeting your goals in all these other areas of your life; you're a successful businessperson, you do well in your job. You have good relationships with people. Now here's this thing that you've tried everything. You've tried changing your behavior, you've tried changing your mindset, you've tried altering things and adjusting. And for some reason, there's a block. And you've tried everything. What really is this block is something that we need to uproot. We might think ‘Oh if I just do this behavior or think these thoughts instead, I’ll be fine’, and then we find we’re still blocked. That’s because you're chopping it down, not uprooting it. Then it will just continue to grow. If you want to completely get rid of the problem there, we have to get to the roots and pull them out.

It’s funny because I recently blogged about that. How we have to get to the root of what’s causing us to feel blocked.

Yeah. It’s so important. People will come into my office and they'll say, “okay Rachel, just tell me what I should do.” They want a quick fix. I wish it was a quick fix. If it was a quick fix, you wouldn’t need me. You're very intelligent, very capable of solving your own problems. You've been doing it your whole life. All of a sudden, this problem feels too big, it feels too overwhelming. And so we're going to have to go deeper. We're going to have to go back. Like, where did this come from? Back to the roots. This can often involve a lot of childhood work.

Your whole world, when you're learning about the world is your family. You don't know anything else. So we learn a lot about the world in that early development phase. Is it a safe place to be? Am I loved unconditionally? What do I need to do in order to achieve love and safety? We learn that from our family and from our parents. And a lot of times, the people who are supposed to protect us and keep us safe, did the opposite. And so now it's hard to navigate in the world and in relationships – with friendships or romantic.

Everyone is just so unique. My job to sit with people when they're in a bad space: they're feeling down; they're feeling angry or confused. I sit with them and share that space and talk with them and help them figure out what they want. It’s such an honor. I mention this because a person’s struggles evolve. It's rarely the same thing from one session to another. Even people who in first session, they say, “I'm struggling with anger or I'm struggling with time management,” a few sessions in, we're no longer even talking about that because it's evolved.

And so I like to give another analogy of so when I was learning how to fly, I had one instructor who was not very good. I learned some bad habits through his instructions.

We got a second instructor, more seasoned. And so he had to unteach me what I learned from the other instructor. Flying is not like riding a bike in the sense of you can’t just pick it back up if you haven't flown in a month. It's like kind of starting over for the first few landings. And so there's one time I had gone about a month or three weeks or a month without flying. And so the instructor was in the seat, and as we were taxiing back, he was like, “I can tell that you haven't flown for three or four weeks because all of your old defaults are back. Everything I've been hammering out of you you're doing again.”

It's actually part of the learning process is create a default when you first learn how to do things, and you have to be very intentional when you’re trying to unteach yourself bad habits until those new things become your new default.

So it's the same with life. You have these old defaults of how you learned about the world, how you learned to interact with people, what you considered safe, and how you've received love. And they've worked for you for a long time. But now you've found that it's not working for you anymore.

With relationships or even with the way they do things, all of a sudden they feel overwhelmed. I've always been able to handle all this stuff and it's like, okay, your body is telling you something, you're getting very overwhelmed. So let's hone in on that. Why is your body overwhelmed? How can you give your body things like that? Because once we know our default, we can be intentional about looking at it and saying, “this is what I want to keep from my default. This is what I want to change.” And then being intentional about creating a new default, recognizing that we're going to put back. We're going to make mistakes, but as long as we are intentional, and say “Okay. I went back to. I reverted back to my old way. I'm going to move forward again.” We can start again.

We've officially started the renovations for our new space!

Check out the most recent progress on the renovations on our new space here.