We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Luca Valentine. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Luca below.
Luca, appreciate you joining us today. We love heartwarming stories – do you have a heartwarming story from your career to share?
It may sound a bit corny, but heartwarming events kinda happen all the time in my line of work. It happened when one of my clients got their five-year sober chip. The first year of sobriety in substance use recovery is often the hardest and I’ve been privileged to walk with this client through most of that journey. Seeing that accomplishment was profound and they were absolutely beaming while they talked about this event. Years of overcoming housing insecurity, family/generational trauma, and so much more.
Heartwarming happens when I see parents coming to understand their neurodivergent child. A child whose brain is so different from their parents’ brains that the parents have sometimes become frustrated, annoyed, blamed the kid, or blamed themselves. Sitting down in therapy, whether virtually or in the home, and helping family members learn to listen to each other is one of my favorite parts of my job.
The final thing that I find heartwarming, ironically, is when a client decides they’re done with care. It’s sad to see them go after building up this working relationship, but it’s also fulfilling. I often say in my first appointment with a new client that eventually they outgrow the need for me. They learn coping skills, set boundaries, and process their day-to-day life on their own. And that’s how they know when they don’t need me anymore.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Social work was not a field I initially thought I’d go into. Like a lot of folks who wanted to do mental health care, I thought I had to go the route of psychology. It was actually my godmother, Cindi who first directed me to look at social work, and I’ve been in love ever since. I started graduate school in Fall 2014 and graduated Spring 2017. I never realized until I was in this program, all the ways that social workers show up to serve our community members. Some social workers are found in dialysis clinics or large hospitals, some specialize in aging/life transitions, birth and perinatal care, HIV case workers and so much more.
As a social worker, I’ve worked in HIV clinics, substance use recovery programs, and eating disorders. Now I run a solo private practice and the ways that I stay in touch with my professional community is as varied as the community members. I’ve done networking events at the Atlanta Humane Society and trainings for large conference. I’ve spoken to college classes, conferences large and small, as well as seek out the counsel of my colleagues when I realize I’m out of my depth.
My private practice, Resilient Wellness is the result of over a decade of training, education, and experience. I started my practice in early 2020 and of course that was an eventful year for other reasons. It was a turbulent and difficult time, but by the time I started doing my practice full time in late 2020, I knew it was the right choice.
Now 4 years later, I boast a myriad of services that very few providers offer; namely training/education, house calls, and some things are specifically free/low cost.
First, I have over a decade of experience speaking at conferences and educating other providers on how to tailor their interventions to best serve their clients. I combine years of lived and professional experience to help clinicians better understand their neurodivergent clients, colleagues, and students.
Secondly, I provide house calls. This is especially useful for my neurodivergent clients who may help navigating an anxiety-provoking environment or experience. For my eating disorder clients, this allows for us to go grocery shopping together or share a meal; meal support can be exceptionally important as mealtime can feel very isolating and difficult for folks with eating disorders.
Finally, pro bono services. I have a passion for equity and social justice, and while I wish I could give away all my services for free…I have bills too. So, the middle ground is that I offer some select services at low/no cost: consultations and letters for gender affirming care. Consultations are free for everyone, but for parents of transgender youth, I can give more than one consultation. I do this because for parents of trans kids, the world can be impossibly difficult to navigate due to the politicization of transgender identities. They just want to find a safe soccer team or school or drama club for their kiddos, or sometimes they want guidance on how to best address their kiddo’s mental and emotional needs. The second part is letters for gender-affirming care; this is a necessary document for a lot of transgender individuals to access lifesaving medical care. I sometimes see folks charging up to $100 for a document I can create in a few minutes and get informed consent in five minutes.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
One of the things that I constantly reflect on, and that informs my modern practice, is my experience in the education system. From middle school up through grad school I was an awful student on paper. Standardized learning environments caused my self-esteem as a student to crumble. It wasn’t until I got the opportunity to prove my knowledge in a different format, that I finally started to feel confident again. I gave a presentation and it wasn’t terribly significant except that I was given a lot of room for creativity. The professor that gave me this assignment had me back every year for ten years to give that same presentation as a guest lecture. I also went onto to be published with that same professor and I don’t think I would be half the social worker I am today, if he hadn’t seen that potential in me. And as soon as I saw it, I never revisited that low place in my life. For all my qualms about the education system as whole, the educators themselves were the ones that made all the difference.
Through this experience, I learned how to prove my proficiency in a different way and this helped me to understand that my brain didn’t work like some of my peers’. I knew I had ADHD (and now know I’m autistic), I just never learned how to work with my brain. My brain was framed as something problematic that needed to be controlled or redirected through medication. Now, years later, I set reminders and have systems of organization and learning that suite my brain. And I teach that to my clients as well: that even when we’re neurodivergent, that doesn’t make us difficult or unwieldy, it’s just the system and/or environment that wasn’t made for us.
How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?
Before I ever had a ‘reputation’ in my field, I had to learn where I fit in. Some jobs were more streamlined or standardized and didn’t challenge me enough. A lot of the jobs I enjoyed that were more challenging, weren’t roles that upward mobility. I experienced a lot of different working environments and constantly enjoyed the work while still feeling as if it wasn’t quite right. Having worked in private practice for almost five years now, I realize why. I’m telling people constantly that “private practice feels like the wild west”. It has allowed me so much space and creativity that I couldn’t imagine doing anything else, at least not for the immediate future. Private pracitce is not for the faint of heart. It requires the ability to wear many different hats, have a variety of different skills and services, and it takes a lot of effort. As a solo practice provider I’m responsible for marketing, networking, taxes, billing, invoices, and so much more. The upside to private pracrtice is that if I ever feel tired or burned out one things, I can always switch to another; the pace also changes throughout the year and so navigating hobbies and social life around the busy and slow seasons is also beneficial; things don’t ever feel stale or stagnant.
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