From Passion to Practice: Navigating Mental Health & Overcoming Anxiety w/ Emily Morris

Ever felt like the world is closing in and you're struggling to cope? Meet Emily Morris, a beacon of hope amidst life's storms with a unique story that began with an episode of Grey's Anatomy. Emily's story is a testament to resilience and the power of dreams, as she journeyed from watching a TV show to establishing a thriving private practice in North Carolina. Her mission? Providing a vital lifeline of support to young women dealing with life's transitions and healing from childhood trauma. Our conversation with Emily uncovers not only her inspiring journey but also the often under-discussed challenges of transitioning from a passion to a full-fledged practice.

As the world continues to spin in chaos, we dive into an important conversation around managing overwhelming emotions and anxiety. Emily shares her arsenal of coping strategies, from the unexpected power of guided visualizations to the science of vagus nerve work, and even the art of setting boundaries with oneself. This episode serves as a reminder that you're not alone, and that help is always available. So, whether you're a mental health professional, someone seeking strategies to manage stress, or simply interested in hearing about Emily's incredible journey, buckle up and join us for this insightful conversation. Remember, no matter the challenges we face, there's a hero within us all, waiting to emerge.

https://www.sessionswithemily.com/
Instagram: @sessionswithemily 

This program is brought to you by:
Kindred Art Therapy
Visit https://www.arttherapync.com/ to schedule a free consultation.
- and -
Alynee Davis, PLLC
Visit https://alynnedavis.com/ to connect.
Alynne is a Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor and Coach.

Be sure to visit BizRadio.US to discover hundreds more engaging conversations, local events and more.

Transcript

Aubrey: 1:01

Welcome to Kindred Conversations, the show where we shine a light on local mental health professionals, who are the unsung heroes of our community. Join us as we delve into their journey, strategies and the art of healing minds. Together, we'll break down stigmas and celebrate resilience. I'm your host, Aubrey Baptista, and today we have a truly remarkable guest with us, Emily Morris, a warm-hearted and authentic therapist right here in North Carolina. It's an absolute pleasure to have you on the show, Emily. Your dedication to helping individuals navigate through transitions and heal from childhood trauma is nothing short of inspiring. Could you share a little bit more about your journey and the passion that drives your work?

Emily: 1:45

Yeah, absolutely.

Emily: 1:46

My journey has been quite a winding one. I think I started becoming interested in working in the mental health field when I was watching an episode of Grey's Anatomy, believe it or not. They had a therapist come in and do some work with some of the doctors and I just thought that would be the most fun and fulfilling job to have. And so I went to school up in Tennessee and kind of paled around doing different community mental health work as well as working in a few different residential treatment facilities for addiction and luckily, whenever we made the move to North Carolina, it sort of just worked out for me to get into clinical practice. So I've been doing that now for the last going on two years At a really great practice in Durham. And, yeah, I'm just now in the process of actually starting my own practice, but I'll be hitting the ground running with that the first of the year. So I'm really excited to get that going and I'm really grateful to you, Aubrey, for having me so that we can talk a little bit about all of this.

Aubrey: 3:04

Yeah, well, sort of like welcome to the private practice world. Thank you For you. You're on like the. You're in the really anxiety provoking period, right when it's like you have quite gotten established yet.

Emily: 3:21

Right, right, yeah, very much in the process of really having to dig deep to figure out what the best road is for me in terms of things like establishing a niche or specific population. I like to work with and figuring out how do I market that and make sure that people are aware Like I'm here, I have availability and I'm really passionate about doing this work. I really love working with young adult women or female, identifying folks, particularly around things like with transitions in life, like going to college or moving away for the first time, relationship issues, things like that. So it certainly has been a process of trying to figure out, you know, how do I do this and how do I find that strength and that inner voice within myself that'll sort of combat the fear and the anxiety, because it can be really scary to go out on a limb, but I'm ultimately very, very excited about being able to do this.

Aubrey: 4:32

Yeah, what is it that you feel like is kind of like pulling you towards or pushing you towards Specifically? You said, like the women that are going through transitions in general, like you said, you're really excited. I want to know more like what's pushing you.

Emily: 4:55

Yeah, I think I mean. Really what it comes down to is so much of my own personal life experience has been about learning to adapt. I've had to adapt ever since I was oh my gosh two years old, to such major changes in the structure of my family and my living environment and have had to go through my own process of learning. How do I develop and maintain myself regardless of the changes that are happening around me, and what are the things I have to do to make sure that I have boundaries, that I'm protecting myself and also that I'm not so rigid in those things that I cut off the most important things which, in my life, have been connecting with other people in a way that's healthy and fulfilling. And so I think I really came into my own in those years toward the tail end of college and then in the years since then, and it's just such an exciting time, I think, for people.

Emily: 6:05

You spend your whole life or at least I know this is true for me right so that my whole life growing up thinking God, I just can't wait. I cannot wait to get out and do my own thing and make my own way, and the reality of doing that is so different, I think, than what a lot of people anticipate, and so the idea of being able to be a person that others can go to and find support and find some sense of direction, that's really neat to me. I'm always so honored when people trust me with that part of their lives because it's so important and so delicate. Yeah, I think that is the best way that I could describe what makes me excited about that population specifically.

Aubrey: 6:50

Yeah, you're talking about that process of developing into who you're going to be for a longer period of time, which is really happening in that age of mid-20s. Give or take, right.

Emily: 7:06

Yes, yes, absolutely, and I think we're lucky, I think, to be in a place now where the expectations for young women are slowly but surely changing and we have a little bit more time to be able to think about that and to experiment with what we want and what we don't want and really develop that identity. So it feels really, really cool to me to get to be kind of a sounding board and also just like a soft landing place for people to work through that. Yeah, I would really love that.

Aubrey: 7:42

What do you think right now are some of the biggest challenges that young women are facing?

Emily: 7:48

Oh my gosh, I could probably talk about that all day. Let me see if I can narrow it down to just a couple. What I see a lot of is young women trying to figure out how to be a boundary person again in a way that doesn't completely restrict their relationships with other people. That trying to find this balance of how do I know what I will and won't tolerate from other people when the world outside of me is constantly trying to influence that boundary? I think that Are we?

Aubrey: 8:33

starting talking about how women have a lot of expectations placed on them for who they're going to be, how they're going to be and for her to try to navigate. Who does she want to be?

Emily: 8:48

Yes, yes, that's such a great way to summarize that Exactly. I mean, it's no secret to anybody. I'm sure we've all seen the Barbie movie in America for her as monologue about you have to be this, but you can't be that. You have to be this, but you can't be that. And I always joke that if I hadn't been born in this exact time in history, I probably would have been burned at the stake for pushing the boundary of what was acceptable for women. And I think that the young women are trying to find what is it that actually works for me, beyond just what I've been told I have to do and I have to accomplish and all of that. So I think it's a fun population to work with.

Aubrey: 9:35

Hmm that's interesting. I wonder like and I had another guest on here Um, we were talking about like LGBTQ Makes me wonder, like you know, how those, how the intersectionality of different identities, merge For people and finding that self-acceptance.

Emily: 9:54

Yeah, I agree. I mean, I think that the the idea of, like, what does it mean to to be a woman, what does it mean to To accept femininity and also to accept masculinity? It's so complex and so personal for for each individual, um and I don't I don't Pretend to be the ultimate expert on that, but but the idea of, again, just finding that balance for yourself, despite the external pressures and what might be coming from friends, from family, I mean, not to mention the social media and the influence that that we're all sort of under these days. It is A really tough road to walk, I think, for a lot of people, and and it's not one that those people need to walk alone, if they feel like they do need support In navigating all of that.

Aubrey: 10:46

You know, I genuinely wonder if it, maybe I'm going to put a post up about this on one of our boards somewhere. Is is literally every single therapist out there working with their Client on how do I scroll less.

Emily: 11:03

I know, I know, I, I even, um, you know, sometimes, from time to time, people will reach out to me Between sessions and send me like a meme or a tick tock or something they're like. This is exactly what we were just talking about.

Aubrey: 11:18

So I, I hear you when I hear you, for sure so with these women that you are, we're working with, going to be working with, like how you envision or how do you like, tie in some of these Modalities that you've become equipped with, like EMDR, equine assisted therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy.

Emily: 11:41

Yeah, I um so when I was doing the equine assisted therapy specifically, hopes in an internship and, honestly, if anybody Listening has the opportunity to participate in that, I think it's one of the most powerful things you can do. So just a quick aside, an endorsement for equine assisted therapy there. It's not something I'm currently doing In my practice, but in terms of EMDR, cbt, um, emdr, specifically as a method for treating trauma, is just so Effective and it seems to work in a way that it's a little bit I mean, not for everybody, but but for a lot of folks it's just a lot faster, so they're able to process this trauma a lot more quickly on a on a level that creates physical changes in the brain, as opposed to Just sitting there and kind of talking and talking and talking and hoping that that um will get the person some relief. And, most importantly, I think when, when we're looking at traumas that there's there has been an idea in the past Thankfully this is changing that that trauma has to be some huge, extreme Thing that's happened to a person you know, like going off to war, being Attacked, or you know that that sort of thing, and that's just not the case.

Emily: 13:02

There are so many little pieces of being a human, growing up and living in a world that At this point moves so much more quickly than where, than we've evolved to, to handle, um, and and so we pick up these little, these little bits, and those things stick with us and they can feel so subtle and so Normalized to us that we don't realize that those are the things, um, that are that are having a negative influence on our behavior or on the the outcomes that we have in life. So emdr I find to be a really effective way of just deconstructing some of what we grew up thinking well, that's just normal and that's just how it is. I just feel that way because X, y and Z and there's something wrong with me that I can't get over that when that's not the case, I mean, none of us get out of our childhood completely unscathed, and so it's up to us, when we have that recognition, to look into that, and EMDR, I find, is a really powerful, effective way to do that.

Aubrey: 14:14

Yeah, what came to my mind was that we were just talking about technology and literally just scrolling your phone and not having enough time to process through an image or something that you've read that connected in a certain way, that those thoughts or memories. They can get stuck in different ways where we don't even realize that they're stuck.

Emily: 14:37

Yes, yeah, exactly, you're taking that information in and not having a filter, necessarily or not by any fault of your own, but just having that constant information overload is not, at this point, what we are designed to take in. And so, like you were saying, going back to what we were talking about earlier, with the scrolling and scrolling and all the social media and internet stuff, I mean it can have a really major impact that we don't even realize it's having until you've. There's the metaphor of the frog in the boiling water. If you try to dump a frog into a pot of water that's already boiling, it'll jump right back out, but if you slowly turn up the heat, the frog doesn't realize that it's in boiling water until it's too late. And that is, I think, exactly what happens with folks whenever they are taking on all this extra information that just doesn't serve them or that they don't have the bandwidth to fully process.

Aubrey: 15:45

Yeah, it's interesting, so our episode is recorded about two weeks before when it comes out. But so this week I had a couple of different clients bringing up the situation that's happening in Israel and talking about anxiety that brings up and it's a challenging issue because it's a world issue. It's an important issue but at the same time it doesn't bear much immediate change to anybody's daily, day-to-day types of stuff. I have my way of kind of addressing that. I was curious how you address situations that come up that are like that they're sort of traumatic in their secondary distance kind of way.

Emily: 16:38

And you mean how I handle that for my own sake or how I handle that with clients?

Aubrey: 16:44

Well, since you brought it up, why don't you answer?

Emily: 16:46

both. What do I do? Well, for one, I have a handful of self-care activities that I try to rely on that involve some kind of movement. I find that when I'm able to move my body in some way and that doesn't necessarily mean that I'm going outside and running like 5K every day you won't catch me doing that but just something like getting out with my dogs or getting up, making sure my environment is how I want it to be, so that the small piece of the small corner of the earth that I get to inhabit has some kind of structure and some kind of inherent safety. In terms of how I perceive it.

Emily: 17:39

I'm trying to think if there are other things. I mean, I think it's important as a therapist whether or not there are these major world events that that Are going on, which kind of seems like all the time anyway these days is to maintain a relationship with my own Therapist, somebody that I've been seeing for years. She's awesome. Shout out, peg, love her, yeah. So Kind of some of the same things that I would do for myself are the things that I would Maybe recommend for a client.

Emily: 18:14

Sort of depends on their preferences and their, their abilities, but I think, really asking themselves, or what I would do with the client is kind of help guide them through the process of figuring out, you know, when you're, when you're considering these events, what is it about them that that is really feeling like it's activating you, you know, is it the, the fear that, oh gosh, what if this comes back to our side of the world?

Emily: 18:42

Or Just the heartache for for what the people that are directly Experiencing that, what they're going through you know, figuring out what it is about this that's really activating for you and for your nervous system. And then, once you've kind of got a somewhat of an idea of that, figuring out what is one thing or a couple of things that I could do to help, I'll kind of bring my nervous system back down and I mean, gosh, you can Google. There are probably 10 million different coping techniques that people can can use, but Some of the ones that I use frequently with folks are like guided visualizations. Also, if, if a person is getting to a point where they're feeling like really panicked, we'll do some some vagus nerve work where we try to sort of reset that nerve that's responsible sort of for for all those Uncomfortable feelings. So that might be things like holding ice cubes for for a minute, doing some guided deep breathing things like that Awesome those all sound super helpful yeah.

Aubrey: 19:59

I was not exactly what I kind of either.

Emily: 20:03

Yeah, I think it helps to to ask yourself you know what, where this is concerned like what is in my Control here and the things that you identify as being in your control to actually take some action with that. Implement whatever is possible for you, whether that's, you know, having some boundaries about how, how much time you're spending looking at, looking at the news or watching tv or whatever, knowing where your threshold is for that and really honoring that. Having some boundaries, not necessarily even with with others, but with yourself, of like okay, this is where I know the line is for me on this, so I'm going to focus on what I can control and do some work around around releasing the need to have control of the rest of it, because that really is where I see people getting into a situation where they're feeling a lot of helplessness, a lot of pain and and that's tough that's a really tough place to be.

Aubrey: 21:05

Yeah, for sure, especially witnessing some both uncontrollable and really painful events that are happening.

Emily: 21:14

Yeah, absolutely it's. It's. It's hard to be a person in this, in this world right now and, yeah, I just really encourage people listening to know that, like you don't you don't have to suffer. There are a lot of people out there that are able to help and able to meet you where you are. Like, for instance, I do, my practice is entirely virtual, so I can meet people wherever they are, literally and metaphorically as well, so there are people out there you really don't have to to suffer forever. There's, there are solutions and there are people out there to help.

Aubrey: 21:56

Emily, how can people find more information about you? Get in contact with you social media website.

Emily: 22:02

Absolutely so. My website is wwwsessionswithemilycom. I also have an Instagram. I don't use it a ton, but I do have one if you want to find me on there. It's the same. It's just at sessions with Emily, yeah, and all my contact information. You can find out more about my specialties, my education. I have a couple of photos of my dogs on my website which I personally think are very cute. Yeah, that's probably the quickest way. All my other information, like email and phone numbers, all that is pretty readily available on my website.

Aubrey: 22:43

Well, thank you again for joining us today. This has been Kindred with Aubrey Baptista, and for those of you who really like this show, go ahead on to bizradious. Be sure to like and subscribe and listen to some of our other episodes. The one that I referenced earlier with was an episode with Breonna Hicks. Okay, well, thanks again, emily, take care okay, yeah, you as well.