The Dance of Unlocking Potential with Comprehensive Therapy Practices

Join us for an eye-opening conversation with mental health professionals Amber Tolbert and Stacey Surratt as they share their journey toward transformative therapy practices. In this episode, we explore the intricate connection between trauma and its impact on all aspects of our being, from the cellular to the cognitive. Discover how Amber integrates holistic approaches into her multi-state group practice, while Stacey brings her expertise in music therapy and creative arts to enhance the therapeutic process. Get ready to be inspired by the stories of resilience and breakthroughs as we delve into the power of personalized, intensive therapy sessions. 

In our first chapter, "Exploring Healing Minds and Resilience," we dive into the world of holistic therapy with Amber and Stacey from the Healing Collective. Discover how they fuse traditional therapeutic services with mind, body, and energy work to create a unique approach to healing. We also discuss the importance of addressing trauma at all levels and the range of modalities used in their practice. In our second chapter, "Transformative Client Experiences in Therapy," we celebrate the profound shifts clients experience through personalized, intensive therapy sessions. From shedding the weight of past traumas to finding clarity and direction, these stories of resilience will inspire you. Join us as we explore the evolution of mental health practices and the dedicated professionals behind them, and learn how innovative and compassionate care can facilitate healing on all levels.

https://the-healingcollective.com/amber-tolbert/
https://the-healingcollective.com/
https://linktr.ee/healingcollectiveteam
www.the-healingcollective.com

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.

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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 journeys, strategies and the art of healing minds. Together, we'll break down stigmas and celebrate resilience. Today is the first time I actually have two guests on. I have Amber Tolbert and Stacey Serrat. Amber is the owner of a multi-state practice that originated here in North Carolina. If I'm correct Amber, it is called the Healing Collective. My words are all jumbling together. Today. Stacey works with Amber and has tons and tons of experience. I'm going to have each of them introduce themselves a little bit more. Welcome, Amber and Stacey. Go ahead, Amber.

Amber: 1:48

Hi, aubrey, thanks for having us. I'm really excited to be here. Yeah, so I've been a group practice owner for over a decade now and have a group practice that works with families, individuals and couples on trauma and how that affects our life as an adult, even when it comes from our backstory. So I do direct care, but we do lots of different services that I'm sure we'll get into later, but thanks for having us.

Aubrey: 2:18

Yeah, welcome, and Stacey, when we had talked before. You have a bunch of background and you're really loving getting into the clinical work here at the Healing Collective right.

Stacey: 2:28

Yeah, I definitely am. I am coming from. My most recent past was in working in the treatment industry higher levels of care and really enjoying transitioning into this role the Healing Collective and direct care, with clinical work, but also with holistic work, which shows up for us in quite a few different capacities.

Aubrey: 2:52

Awesome. So, Amber, you had shared that this is multi-state. So what states are you in?

Amber: 2:58

Yeah, so we started out actually right on the border of South Carolina and North Carolina, in Fort Mill, and our original name was Fort Mill Psychotherapy. So two years ago I took the company and rebranded from a clinical company focused on traditional therapeutic services to holistic services, where now we work with mind, body and energy, but we cover all of North and South.

Aubrey: 3:25

Carolina, okay, so mind, body and energy. So do you have practitioners other than clinicians working, or are they specialists in those areas?

Amber: 3:36

Yeah, my whole team specializes in trauma, but what research shows about trauma is that it affects the cellular level, the physical level, as well as the cognitive level. So, as trauma healers, many of us aren't just therapists anymore doing traditional therapy. We're also energy healers, reiki healers, yoga teachers, and so we incorporate all the modalities in order to provide holistic services.

Aubrey: 4:05

Whoa. So how many practitioners do you have? I have 10. Awesome, and are you going to stay at 10 or are you going to go for more?

Amber: 4:12

I have a feeling we're going to keep growing. I think I would be very comfortable with the current team I have and with research and how the world just keeps evolving. It's almost necessary to keep growing, yeah.

Aubrey: 4:24

Yeah, I was compelled to talk to you when I saw your bio because I am like sort of teeing up my practice to get into the group stuff. So, yeah, I think it's a conversation that we can kind of table because it kind of gets into the weeds a little bit for our listeners. But I was excited about that.

Amber: 4:43

Yeah, thanks, we do that consulting on the side and I own another company called Stepping Into Wholeness with Sheila Maitland. She is the owner of the Relationship Enrichment Center. But yeah, we do consulting and a lot of that other stuff too.

Aubrey: 4:56

Yeah, that's awesome. So, stacey, you're on a different side of the practice, so Amber is kind of overseeing and Stacey, you're getting to really do like the hands-on work. Not that you're not doing that, amber, right, you probably wear many hats, but Stacey's coming in as a contractor employee.

Stacey: 5:13

Yeah, and, yeah, I get to spend a good amount of time in direct care, client work and then also doing some supervision and delving into all my favorite things. I'd still enjoy clinical work, but I also really enjoy bringing in creative arts, bringing in music and sound and raking other things as well.

Aubrey: 5:37

Yeah, and Stacey, we had talked before. You're a music therapist? Yes, I am, which is super, super exciting to know another expressive therapist and you still maintain your music therapy registration.

Stacey: 5:53

I do.

Aubrey: 5:53

Yeah. So how does that come into play with your clients? Like, can you give me one it doesn't have to be music therapy related, right, but just one client experience that you feel like was really like profound for you to get to witness their transformation?

Stacey: 6:08

Oh, it's hard to pick one, I know.

Stacey: 6:11

So part of what we do is kind of the weekly, individual, more recurring, ongoing maintenance type work, and then we also do intensives, where we come together with our clients for three or four hours over the course of a day, or even longer than that over the course of a few days, and really I love being able to do that type of work too, because it gets past kind of the initial hey, how was, how was your week, how was your week and allows you to spend so much more time in the middle parts before needing to wrap things back up.

Stacey: 6:48

And I really enjoy being able to come into some of the longer space, more intensive type work where there is space and time to bring in creative arts and there is space and time to bring in other things, and so each of our intensives looks a little bit different, but I'm thinking of one right now that Amber and I actually did together. There's a variety of different things and we had a client that was pretty stuck in her process and just having trouble figuring out what direction to go next, and we started out with kind of some some standard talk stuff and then got into some more experiential work, which included the use of drawn mandala and Mari, as well as use of Reiki, and she really left in a very different mental, emotional space than she did when she came in, and that's just a beautiful thing to watch on the journey.

Aubrey: 7:41

So when you say that she was in a very different space, you were saying that she wasn't sure where to go next. Did she feel by the end of that like she had more of a direction?

Stacey: 7:49

Yeah, more direction, more clarity, clarity and just an overall better feeling in terms of peacefulness, security, less anxiety, less fear.

Aubrey: 8:02

Yeah, you kind of get into the intensive model on this topic here in general about how you can go so much deeper because you have that length of time to really dive in.

Stacey: 8:12

Yeah, for sure.

Aubrey: 8:13

Amber, what has been really a profound moment for you that you could highlight with a client?

Amber: 8:19

Oh, wow, okay, I've had a lot and I know it's. It happens in almost every intensive I do. The purpose of an intensive, or, as Stacey shared, an intensive is, in terms of hours, just a really long therapy session, and it depends on what the client is in need of, where it gives the clinician or myself the opportunity to really customize the services based on what they're needing. Where is their stuckness? Is it in their thoughts? Is it a freeze response? Where they're literally stuck in their body and struggling to make movement happen in their world, in their relationships? Is it stuckness in their energy?

Amber: 9:04

So being able to do intensives allows me the opportunity to create movement in all three of those areas, because we can start building safety, which is usually in the physical body, and then we move deeper and deeper and deeper.

Amber: 9:19

So I think for me, being able to utilize intensives with the support of Reiki or energy healing allows me to see a full circle. It allows the client to experience what we call a full circle and basically what that means is something from someone's back story, a trauma and experience and exposure. An event is stuck somewhere and in those intensives we're able to create a different outcome which brings a lot of relief emotionally, physically, energetically. And when the client walks out, there is this description of I feel 10 pounds lighter, I feel really clear. And doing that with a long-term client on her inner child, one particular is standing out for me where there was just a lot of shedding through tears and creating a different outcome, where she was no longer stuck in that, um, historically abusive relationship and got some clarity on how to keep herself safe and current day as an adult. So, yeah, it brings. It brings a lot of shifting in a lot of different ways.

Aubrey: 10:34

So, reading between the lines on this one, are you saying that this was a client that was kind of contemplating whether or not to leave an abusive relationship? Yes, and afterwards she had made the decision that this was something that she needed to do was to leave. Yes, so that's a really powerful outcome.

Amber: 10:53

It is it is. It is because, so often, um, I am who I am because of where I come from and I always, or I frequently, refer to that as a blueprint or almost like the coding and a computer, and so I can be very cognitively intelligent, be very high functioning, work in the corporate world, which is where most of our clients come from. And then there's a part of my life that there's a stuckness where I can't show up the same way, and that's usually because that's a part of my backstory, a part of my childhood, and there's a theme where maybe those who were supposed to love and protect me, also, intentionally or unintentionally, were those that hurt me. So the way that it keeps us stuck is, as adults, I don't know how to keep myself safe, I don't know how to thematically step into that adult role or responsibility, and so I end up putting myself in relationships where I repeat those patterns.

Aubrey: 11:45

Wow, yeah, so through, so, through these different modalities, then you're able to get to the heart of that. So what I'm curious about is, kind of logistically, how this works. You have a team of multimodal practitioners. Do you schedule all of them for a day, for an intensive, do you schedule a few? Like how does that work?

Amber: 12:07

Yeah, so logistically most of my team is virtual and typically we do the intensives in person, either in our Charleston location, our Fort Mill location or our Valentine Pineville location.

Amber: 12:21

And because my whole team is trauma specialists, they are supporting our clients in walking this out in a lot of different ways, but basically in in creating joining and stabilization with the client, for the client.

Amber: 12:38

And so a lot of us come into therapy because something in my life isn't giving me the outcome that I want or there's a relationship that is as supportive as it is stressful. So we support them walking through our treatment model that is inclusive of this deeper work. And when clients get stuck in some of the traditional sessions, that's when we start to introduce the idea of intensives and most of our clients come to us for those services as well. Because there is just a big difference in doing a one, one hour session for four weeks in a row that's a whole month and being able to get once I am able to reach a place of safety in my body and can regulate, being able to do an intensive on a day for four hours, a lot of relief can happen a lot quicker and a lot of clarity can happen a lot quicker, but we're very strategic with when those intensives happen and is the client able to regulate and build safety for themselves and are they able to walk out the intensive afterwards?

Aubrey: 13:48

Yeah, and that's a really powerful not just that example that you highlighted or the example that Stacey highlighted, but just in general like the power that you are bringing into the therapy room because of the amount of time and dedication that you're providing in that session. It's amplified, and it's not just amplified by the number of hours, but it's also the amount of care and one-on-one that you're providing in that amount of condensed time.

Amber: 14:18

Right, yeah, Like in an intensive with Stacey and I co-facilitating, there's two professionals in the room but we're really providing the care of about five professionals at once. How does that work? Through the energetic healing, through cross-training, through sound healing, through inner child experiential?

Aubrey: 14:41

So you guys are sort of playing off of each other and you work well together. So one of you might be donging the bells while the other one is doing something with the lights. Exactly, yeah, ok, oh, to be a fly on the wall in one of these experiments.

Amber: 14:58

Quite challenging to describe it. Yes, it's definitely an experience to be had.

Aubrey: 15:04

Yeah, for sure. When you said earlier that you do a lot of direct care, is this what you were referring to?

Amber: 15:09

I do so. My work consists mostly of the intensives. I either facilitate the intensive or I co-facilitate with my team, and then I also do two and a half or three and a half day workshops where we do the same services but it's offered in a group immersion, where it's amplified healing by the number of people in the room. It's really amazing, Woo-hoo.

Aubrey: 15:35

I feel like Goosebumps thinking about it. Yeah, stacey, I'm curious if you in you know, as we're talking through this, if you had anything you wanted to add.

Stacey: 15:44

No, I think Amber does a fantastic job of describing kind of what shows up, and I think this is one of the things that's so difficult to conceptualize and to describe and that makes it really hard to picture without really seeing an action right, because it's not something that there's a formula for. Well, I'm imagining you can look up and find you know online somewhere.

Aubrey: 16:09

Yeah, for sure. And I'm just imagining like I've been in client sessions where the client, you know, is just kind of starting to peel back within the last like. So we have a 60 minute session and they're starting to peel back at like out at minute 45. And you're looking at the clock thinking like, oh, okay, like they're just starting to warm up.

Aubrey: 16:29

We only have 15 minutes left of this session and you know by the time that they've really kind of gotten their groove. Then it's like we're ending the session and we're going to come back to it next week and it's like we're just kind of get off the hamster wheel and get back on the hamster wheel again. So it's totally like it makes so much sense that you would move that client to a more intensive treatment option that's overall going to decrease their length of time and treatment.

Stacey: 16:56

Absolutely. And I think you know one of the things that, while there isn't a formula and you're not going to be able to find a session plan for one of our intensives anywhere, because we are, you know, communicating with telepathy and I and things like that to play off of one another during those, I think the common denominator for the majority of the work that we're doing is in the understanding that in today's society we've, by and large, become really disconnected from self, really disconnected from relationship with self, and in order to heal trauma, in order to move to a place of wholeness and of safety, that relationship with self has to become primary and has to be reconnected. And so that's really kind of the foundational idea underneath whatever is executed in an individual or an experiential session or even our workshops, is developing that relationship back with self.

Aubrey: 17:54

Yeah, I totally agree, and I think it also has to do with our relationship with our communities and like our people, who, you know, are supposed to be able to keep us safe, and so I really like the title that you renamed it to Amber the healing collective, and so, yeah, I just think that you guys are doing great, great work there and I'm excited to be able to promote you on this show. And you know, part of the show is getting to share, like anywhere that people can find you, so you're welcome to go ahead and share that now.

Amber: 18:28

Oh sure, Thank you. So our website is wwwthe-healingcollectivecom and you can also just call our office. Our route of what we do is relational, so we really like when people call it's 803-216-1604. And Stace, do you have the social media handles? I can grab them quickly.

Stacey: 18:54

Thank you. Yeah, you can find us on Facebook at facebookcom backslash, the healing collective team, and you can find us on Instagram as well with the same handle.

Aubrey: 19:08

Awesome. Well, all of that information is going to be in the show notes, so thank you, guys, for listening that off and thank you for being the first time that I brought two guests on at once. It was really great for those of you who are listening in. We're on bizradious. Be sure to like and subscribe this channel, as well as checking me out on my website, wwwarttherapynccom.