Holistic Trauma-Informed Therapy Helping Caregivers Uncouple From Painful Stories and Reclaim Themselves

If I am not working, I am outdoors. I live in Asheville. I relocated here a few years ago from Atlanta and I am 15 minutes from the mountains, I'm five minutes from a river and I also have a farm where I do equine therapy. So I will either be at the barn or I'll be out with my great Dana, my chihuahua and my family exploring all the beautiful nature that's here. Hi, I'm Elizabeth Corbett. I'm a psychotherapist at Perspectives Center for Holistic Therapy. I work with adolescents and adults. I've been with Perspectives since I started my career. So I'm entering into my fifth year at Perspectives with a year of internship tucked in there as well. My clients can expect when they work with me first of all that they're going to be in a space where they can say whatever they need to say. A lot of clients come to me feeling really heavy and burdened with their own story because my clients tend to be caregivers and their life is all about helping other people, supporting other people, listening to them and they can be really uncomfortable talking about their own experience, so it's a place where we're really going to explore who you are and how you got here and we'll do that in a variety of ways we might use some EMDR, we might use some narrative therapy, we might get outside and walk in nature that it's going to be a safe space and it's a space for you to explore. My personal background is that I'm coming out of a nursing career, I worked in a neonatal ICU for ten years and then I worked in community as an RN with those kids once they went home, I did that for ten years. And what I saw is that there's a huge gap in caring for people who are in the middle of a crisis, caring for their emotional and their mental health needs, I saw it play out again and again and again at the hospital where I worked and so I went back to school and got a graduate degree in counseling so that I could really work with families who fall into that gap. What made me want to join Perspectives is that they really are a holistically oriented practice and what that means to me is they really look at all the different parts that influence who we are as humans. We look at our earlier experiences, we look at the relationships we're in now, we look at the work we do the work we value, we look at our physical health, our movement, our nutrition, we look at the whole picture because we know it all matters. That's really what made me want to be at Perspectives and that's really why I stay there because it is a very humanistic, holistic perspective of looking at us as humans. As a therapist, I would say my primary approach is trauma informed and what that means to me is we've all had experiences that have impacted us sometimes in very profound and painful ways and so all of my training, post graduate school has been focused on working with people who've had traumatic experiences and want to uncouple themselves from that story and create a new story. So I do a lot of Narrative Therapy, I do a lot of EMDR, the eye movement therapy you read about in the paper and I also do equine therapy here in Ashville. I'm working with clients that are local to me. I think that for me, the primary way that therapy benefits people it's a space where you can show up however you are and you can be accepted, you can be heard and you can also be supported as you sit in really, really difficult moments or feelings or situations, so it's journeying with you and it's also helping you map out how you might want to move forward in a way that aligns with your passions and your values and what you want for yourself. To me, when I think of holistic therapy I think of one In many ways, it's the opposite of the medical model that I was trained in as a nurse. It means that we don't just look at what's not working, we also look at what is working and if something isn't working, well, we look at why we don't just try to fix the "the problem" but we really look underneath to see if we can work with that, the problem just kind of goes away on its own because we understand what was creating it. So it's looking at the whole person and honoring all those parts.