Starting a blog feels like starting a conversation with a stranger you can’t put a face to and know nothing specific about. I’ve looked at composing this first post with a sense of anxiousness and excitement that I’m sure any reader of this can relate to, whether it is because you have also started a blog at one point in time or have just had to meet a stranger and didn’t quite know what to say.
I suppose at least one of the things I would want to know, having been the stranger reading a blog for the first time, is why? Why do what you do? Why go into private practice? And why did you create this private practice? So I will attempt to answer, simply and succinctly, these questions now.
I think we are all born with a temperament, a pattern of thought and behavior that is more biologically engrained than learned from our environment. We give labels to these things with young children, and we often enlist them in classrooms because of their tendencies towards one “style” or another. I was (and —spoiler alert— still am) a helper. I wanted people to be happy and to be successful around me. I felt joy when I could make someone laugh, and pain when I saw someone cry. And as I got older and at times didn’t do things to be helpful for various reasons, I realized that I am being the most “me” when I am helping. To coin a phrase, I call it “character resonance,” when what you choose to do deeply matches what you believe to be the right thing for you to do.
Being a therapist has been one of my main outlets for this need to help others, and I have been fortunate enough to have gathered a wide range of experiences in helping throughout my career so far. I’ve worked in residential facilities, both state funded and private pay. I’ve worked in a nearly-free clinic helping anyone that came through the door. I’ve worked in community mental health in rural settings in 2 states, including on-call crisis response work in both environments. I’ve worked with kids as young as 2 1/2 and adults as old as 91. And in all of these environments I’ve found the same joy and satisfaction with helping that I’ve always known.
However, in working in these environments I’ve also come to know some of the frustrations and limitations that our current health care system has. I’ve learned about how hard it can be to get comprehensive, holistic treatment that insurance will pay for. That preventative care in mental health is almost non-existent on personalized basis outside of private pay. That despite how much we have learned regarding the connections between mind and body, we still limit most treatment to one or other, and with treating the body spend way too much time focused on medications over other research-supported alternatives.
These frustrations have lead to why I am doing this and what “this” is. I created Canopy Therapy with the aim to open up the mental health treatment model to be more inclusive of other practices and treatments that are out there. The goal being to give clients more options and more help than the current wide-spread model is doing. Our lives are multi-dimensional, with aspects in many fields that we draw on for success, our health care should be equally intelligent.
But now back to where this all is today. This is the first post, and the practice is just beginning. Right now, Canopy is just me and I am a Mental Health Therapist. In the future I intend on bringing in more healthcare practitioners from diverse fields, either through referral or hopefully under the same roof so that we can work together to provide people with an integrated and holistic treatment package. But to begin with now, I want to try and bring in articles, anecdotes, research, and other interesting things that are going on in our world, and in our communities that we may not have thought about as relating to mental health but absolutely do. Both the silly and the serious. To help provide anyone reading with more tools than just therapy and medications.
And if you’ve read this far, thank you. I promise to be more brief moving forward. :)
