We recently connected with Elaina Pivovar and have shared our conversation below.

Elaina, appreciate you joining us today. Can you recount a time when the advice you provided to a client was really spot on? (Please note this response is for education/entertainment purposes only and shouldn’t be construed as advice for the reader)

My best advice for a client, friend, reader or anyone who will listen is to learn how to quiet yourself and slow down. So often, our primary coping skill for the ups and downs of life is to compartmentalize, distract and keep running ahead with the demands of life. And while this may work for a while, eventually all those thoughts and emotions have a way of catching up with us. Whether physically (we start to have headaches, tight muscles, trouble sleeping, digestive issues, etc.), emotionally (we have trouble regulating, getting angry over seemingly little issues, feeling overwhelmed all the time, numbing out, etc.) or in our own minds (racing thoughts, anxiety, self-hatred, insecurity, fears/worries about the future or the past, etc.), one way or another the strategy of stuffing and running will eventually catch up to us and the result is not pretty. No matter what someone’s counseling goals are, we almost always need to grow skills in learning to slow down and turn towards the events of the past that we have tried to forget. More often than not, while my clients may be very skilled in compartmentalizing, these events still leave an impression on how we see ourselves. We have to work to develop a muscle for slowing down and making meaning of our life experiences with intention.

Some strategies to help if you’re just getting started is to first find a place and time where you can feel safe and peaceful in your environment. If you don’t have this yet, that’s your step! The next step is to ground into the present moment, (called being mindful), noticing what you can see, hear, feel, smell and perhaps taste in that safe, peaceful place. From here, you can go inward, noticing but not judging what comes to mind. You may benefit from a prompt like what were times this week I felt most and least that I was connected, belonged, and felt loved? Or simply notice where in your body you feel “off” and bring awareness to this. Or perhaps you pull up a Wheel of Emotions on your phone and identify the emotions that come to the service. There is no one way to do this, but the goal is to get connected to your thoughts, emotions and body sensations. From here, you may benefit from just noticing and attuning to these things by saying “this is stress” or “this is fear” or “this is peace.” In some cases, by us just slowing down and acknowledging the feeling, it will pass. In other instances, we may need to respond to the feeling. Perhaps if you noticed feeling rejected this week, you want to reach out to a safe person to receive a feeling of connection. Perhaps if you noticed feeling energized, you look for a way to spread this feeling to those around you. If you feel anxious, maybe you want to practice gratitude or a “what I DO know” list to combat the out of control feeling.

My best advice to all clients is (1) learn how to quiet, (2) identify your thoughts, (3) emotions and body sensations and then respond to them congruently. Often I find clients who have been stuck in a spiraling process for many years find relief. The result may be an initial uptick in distress, discomfort or overall emotion. But the long-term result is something alike to letting air slowly leak from a balloon that was about to pop. We don’t realize how uncommon it is for us to slow down and tune in with ourselves until we are asked to do it! Simple, yes, but very challenging for many.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I am a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, I specialize in therapy with women to help them navigate self-esteem, anxiety, depression, trauma and life transitions. I use my training in Eye Movement Desensitizations and Reprocessing (EMDR) to help clients overcome traumatic life experiences that keep them stuck. I also work with teens and parents to help bridge the communication gap and help foster relationship between parents and their teenagers. I enjoy helping engaged couples prepare for marriage and am a certified SYMBIS facilitator.

I received my Master’s in Marriage and Family Therapy from Kansas State University and currently work in the Private Practice setting at Miranda Counseling in Leawood. I love working with clients who are dealing with new obstacles that feel impossible to cope with as well as those who have past wounds that they can’t seem to find healing from. I enjoy helping clients identify how lies they have been believing about who they are could be holding them back and how we can process and release past events to help create a new, more accurate way of seeing ourselves. I often work with clients to help them increase emotional awareness and acceptance in order to increase their ability to cope with the stressors and demands of day to day life. Much of my work is helping clients overcome the impacts of traumatic life events through EMDR, helping to reduce the emotional distress associated with these events and allowing the client to move forward with peace, confidence and overall well-being.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

The various roles a therapist has in a client’s life can be a difficult balance. Often this field draws people who are gentle, gracious, generous with their time, thus making it hard to know how to wear both hats of having a successful practice and caring for people well. An important lesson perhaps most entrepreneurs or business owners have to unlearn is feeling guilty for charging for services. The shift from deeply validating the most difficult experiences a person has to checking in on missing payments can be uncomfortable. And for those of us who work in the helping field, advocating for yourself and being compensated for our expertise can rub up against our desire to flexible peacekeepers at all times.

I certainly had to unlearn a false idea that upholding financial policies of my business has to be uncomfortable. There’s nothing wrong with believing you are adding value and being paid fairly for all the training, continuing education, time and expertise you offer to your clients. I remember in grad school needing to collect payments from clients, who really were paying the clinic, not paying me since I was still a therapist in training at the time. Still, myself along with many other classmates would allow clients to build up a decent sized balance before we would finally find the words to address the elephant in the room. Now, owning my own practice, I have taken my own advice to turn towards those difficult conversations, set an example of setting boundaries with clients and, in turn, communicating to myself that my work is worthy of being compensated fairly and within a timely manner.

If you could go back in time, do you think you would have chosen a different profession or specialty?

There is a small group of people who know what they want to do from a very young age. They have a vision, they stick to it and end up fulfilling the picture they had in their mind. The larger majority of us fumble around a fair bit and hopefully stumble serendipitously upon a career that brings fulfillment. I was certainly in the latter group. Having my eyes fixated on medical school since I was very young, I was as surprised as anyone when after one semester of college, all that school lost its appeal. After four or five major changes, it wasn’t until shortly before my senior year of my undergraduate degree at K-State that I decided pursuing counseling would be a good fit for my interests and giftings. I have always been the type to have a variety of interests, able to get curious about nearly any topic. So, choosing and being satisfied with a profession was always going to be a challenge for me, even if I couldn’t see it from that young age. Now, I have much more peace understanding I will never be someone who is able to do one thing day in and day out and feel all facets of myself are completely fulfilled. Thus, when pondering if I would go back and change career paths, the answer invariably is NO! I love getting to work in such a direct and significant format as counseling. Each person who comes through my doors has a unique story and a specific set of needs that no one has had before them, thus adding variability to my days. The work is a beautiful combination of assessment/analytical and the art of connecting with people in ways that brings about healing. Throughout my time, I’ve been able to focus on different presenting concerns including trauma, anxiety, depression, self-esteem, self-compassion work, etc., so my ever curious mind never runs out of topics to study.

I often believed that the goal was to find one thing you liked to do and do it forever. However, I’ve since changed the goal to be much more open and flexible than 15 year old Elaina envisioned. My hope now is to pursue learning, curiosity and enjoyment with work. I used to imagine failure was not feeling totally satisfied with the role you chose when you were 18. Now, of course, I understand the folks who fit that expectation are small in number. Instead, I hope to approach career much as I instruct clients to approach general life: with curiosity, openness. For me, the current steps look like pursuing training for Equine-Assisted Psychotherapy, eating disorder treatment, developing greater proficiency with EMDR treatments and even finding ways to get involved with things I care about outside of work to satisfy the various interests and passions I hold. The world of counseling holds such a vast array or specialities, it’s hard to run out of things to learn!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://mirandacounseling.com/elaina-pivovar/ or https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapists/elaina-pivovar-leawood-ks/856739
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elainapivovartherapy/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elaina-pivovar-35002b160/