As a psychotherapist for the past nine years, I have often thought about starting a blog, but it never actualized until now.
As a reader, I wanted you to get to know a little about me before I share what I hope will be meaningful and helpful content for you.
I would like to start off by answering the two most common questions I receive from clients.
Why did you want to become a therapist?
Some people knew exactly what they wanted to do the moment they left high school. That was not me. Not by a long shot! I didn’t really take college seriously until I had truly felt the calling. I would go for a few semesters, work in different jobs, and subsequently change my major a few hundred times; maybe an exaggeration… But not by much.
It all came into focus when I left the finance industry in 2006 to embark on what turned out to be a short-lived career as a professional poker player.
When I started out on this dangerous and ill-advised road, I promised my sister I would enroll in college at least part-time. You know… Just as a fallback in case poker wasn’t my supreme calling.
I remember looking through the course catalog and thinking, “Psychology. That sounds cool.”
Upon taking my first class, Abnormal Psychology, I fell in love with the discipline. I didn’t exactly know what I wanted to do at this point, but an idea started to form. I enjoyed academia so much, that I elected to write an honors thesis as an undergraduate student. I was hardcore. My plan was to get into a doctoral program in Clinical Psychology, and become a psychologist.
Ultimately, it would take a couple of years for me to find work in the mental health field, and I knew I needed some experience to apply to one of these programs.
Eventually, I got the experience I needed and applied to two programs. These programs were very competitive, and I did not get in. I was discouraged, but had found while working in community health; I enjoyed applying what I had learned.
Enter my mother, Joyce LaHue, LCSW-S, Co-founder of LaHue Counseling Services. She said, “Do like me and go into social work. You can be a therapist, and you can be more marketable.”
So I did just that, and while I was in the graduate program at the University of Texas at Arlington, I was also learning how to talk to people at my job in community mental health. The combination of learning from school, and applying what I learned in the field, led to the strong desire to become a psychotherapist. The rest is history.
Why do you specialize in trauma?
There are both professional and personal aspects to this.
From personal experience, I knew that trauma affected people in different ways and that trauma can have a way of sticking with someone. In retrospect, I believe that my decision to pursue this specialty was certainly to help others, but it also had to do with healing myself.
I would later receive psychotherapy to address my trauma using Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing or EMDR. By chance happening, the community mental health agency I was working for while I was a Child and Adolescent Therapist decided to train us in this wonderful modality. Upon learning how to help people heal through EMDR, I was encouraged by the results, especially in my solo private practice.
This experience led me to become a certified EMDR therapist in Fort Worth, Texas, then an Approved Consultant, and finally an EMDR Basic Trainer, a role I feel very blessed to be in now.
After those initial results from EMDR, I convinced my mother to join me and start what is now LaHue Counseling Services.