Today we’d like to introduce you to David Michalowski

Hi David, so excited to have you on the platform. So before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?

I grew up in a suburb of Chicago called Naperville, IL. It has become quite the bougie burb these days, but back in the 80’s it was a very humble, though growing town. My dad grew up there and built my childhood home on part of his family’s garden plot. My dad was a jock turned auto mechanic and could fix anything with his hands. My mom was a professional ballerina turned homemaker that also taught ballet on the side. Both of them only had high school educations and they both came from traumatizing homes of their own.

Even though they both had real intentions of loving me and my siblings (which is definitely worth something), their mental health issues severely limited their ability to do this. As a kid whose brain was forming, it created this fog in my mind where it was hard to discern the truth – they say they love me, but their behaviors constantly contradict this. It created within me a deep aversion to them (now I know that this is a biological disgust reaction) and I pulled away from them emotionally while learning to smile when they said they loved me. They masked their deficiencies as humans and in turn, I learned their masking ways.

As I grew up, I felt like I wasn’t connecting with life like I could. I would see this in friends or mentors who seemed to know something about life I didn’t. I also grew up in a conservative evangelical Christian household and went to a truly miserable, dogmatic church. Going into college, I knew how to fix an engine and judge people about their lack of faith, but I didn’t know myself and struggled to be honest about myself.

I kept searching though – learning about history and philosophy, seeing there is more to the world. I kept trying new things and eventually went to grad school for psychology. It was there where I really started to get a clearer understanding of myself and my story and started my journey as a therapist.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?

This can be answered from a couple different angles. The road for anyone to become a therapist is long – graduate school, two years of licensure hours after graduating, national exams, different state requirements, and bad paying jobs is the first 10 years. It look me almost two years to transfer my Illinois license to New York because the state government’s laws weren’t updated with the national law, so I had to fight it. The only place where therapists start to earn a decent income is if they are in private practice–which we aren’t taught how to do in school.

The comical tragedy of all this is that you can work your butt off doing all these things and still be a bad therapist. I talked about this in greater detail in a previous article, but I’ve had to grow as a person and as a therapist by facing my own blind spots and limitations. That has been the biggest challenge – really becoming someone that can help others requires me to heal and grow. Many therapists don’t do this or think they have done it, but their ability to help people will remain hampered by their blindspots.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?

I’m a Licensed Professional Counselor who practices in Manhattan. I have my own practice called The Mindful Map Mental Health Counseling. I think the thing that sets me apart from others is that I’m really able to see how a person thinks very quickly and can articulate it to clients on the spot. Often I get feedback from clients that they learned more in their first session with me then previous years of therapy. I grew up in a family with a ton of engineers – my dad was a mechanic, grandfather was an electrical engineer, uncle a computer engineer and brother is a mechanical engineer. My whole life I’ve been trained in how to process and diagnose structural issues of any kind, no naturally I’ve taken that approach and have applied it to the human mind. I can see not just how a client thinks, but how they came to think that way and how they want others to think about them. All the pieces of a person’s mind fit together like an fine tuned engine and I can help a person get better with this sort of mental precision.

Risk taking is a topic that people have widely differing views on – we’d love to hear your thoughts.

I love this question because it’s a huge part of the therapy I do. Risk is a required ingredient for growing as a human. Studies show that neuroplasticity is unlocked when we try something new with a moderate amount of stress and anxiety. Brain change doesn’t happen when a person is in their comfort zone, but its also true that being flooded with anxiety and stress wont help mental development either. I constantly tell clients that coming to therapy and talking about their life only goes so far and that real change happens when they open up and try something new in real life. Psychologically this often requires a person to break out of the neurotic role they have been playing in their family and relationships. Like if a person always has to be ‘the strong one’ they are stuck in this one sided existence of masking their thoughts and feeling in order to ‘support’ others. Usually there is a low functioning parent in this family that can’t tolerate facing themselves or reality, so the child ends up playing the role of trying to calm the chaotic parent with empty, but ‘certain’ reassurances of some kind. Its quite the risk for this client to have an authentic voice in the conversation. It’s quite the paradigm shift to believe that real strength is when he or she is able to be honest in a direct and kind way. This practice of sharing their mind is a risk that they will repeatedly need to take in order to grow out of this role as ‘the strong one.’ The good news is that I’ve seen this happen in my life and in the lives of my clients.

Pricing:

• $300 per session

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.themindfulmap.com/
• Instagram: @themindfulmapofficial
• Facebook: https://facebook.com/themindfulmapofficial