We recently connected with Melissa Kilbride and have shared our conversation below.

Melissa, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today If you had a defining moment that you feel really changed the trajectory of your career, we’d love to hear the story and details.

I think of the moment as a period of time. I was working at a pediatric inpatient psychiatric hospital right out of graduate school and it was barely a question of whether or not the children there had been sexually abused but a matter of by who and how often. It really opened my eyes to how prevalent childhood sexual abuse was and the trauma that was sure to impact these kids throughout their lives. Around this same time I was providing counseling to middle schoolers and during one session, a 13 year old student told me that she wanted to stay a virgin until marriage for religious reasons. As we continued to work together, it became apparent that she was already having sexual intercourse. When we eventually spoke about it, it was clear that she did not know what losing her virginity meant. She had been told by family, teachers at school, and youth leaders at church not to have sex until marriage, but she never learned what exactly that meant. It was these work experiences that brought to my attention how poorly we, as an education system and a society, were failing children around sexual health education and body safety.

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 trained as a clinical social worker and own a group therapy practice in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, DC. I worked in advertising right out of undergrad and while it was exciting in many ways, I just knew it was not going to be a long term fit for me. I remembered a college marketing professor talking about the difference between psychology and advertising and saying “they’re similar, but one has to decide if they want to help people or manipulate them.” She was joking, but something about that stuck. So when I left advertising I knew I wanted to become a therapist. After working for many years with children in hospitals, agencies, and schools I opened a private practice and transitioned to working with adults. A few years in I started hiring clinicians and we became a group practice. What I saw working with adult clients was that people who come in with anxiety, depression, relationship challenges, etc were often talking about something under a sexual health umbrella – past trauma, sexual or gender identity, infidelity, porn “addiction”, sexual dysfunction, etc. And I just kept thinking if we could do a better job of providing comprehensive sexual heath education throughout the life span, there could be less trauma around some of these things later. I also had kids of my own around this time and common conversation topics with other new parents around this time were about how we were going to talk to our kids about these topics. I noticed that these were conversations that I felt very comfortable talking about and had strong feelings about. So this is how I built the Askable Mama portion of my business. I started offering workshops for parents, often in people’s living rooms, to help them feel more confident about discussing all sorts of sexual health related topics with kids; body safety, anatomy, puberty, etc… This is all under the umbrella of safety, abuse prevention, and a path to healthy relationships later in life.

Other than training/knowledge, what do you think is most helpful for succeeding in your field?

I think authenticity is a huge part of the work I do. I have education, work experience, and specialized knowledge but that doesn’t make me a perfect parent. And, it does not make my kids immune to the things I want to protect all children from. Nor does it ensure I will always be able to have easy breezy conversations with my kids. And I think this is important for me to remind people of, even in a professional space. I share some examples of my own mistakes or parenting failures to help normalize the struggle and difficulty. And I like to bring humor in. I think humor, when appropriate, helps to lighten things so when you are talking about tough topics and there is space for it, I turn to humor. The authenticity piece is important in therapeutic relationships too – it’s not usually something therapists are taught in school – we are taught to be boundaried and neutral but the client/therapist relationship is also a real human relationship and sometimes it can be counterintuitive to try and hide authentic reactions – tears, joy, relief, frustrations. I let those things into my work when they’re appropriate.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

I think like so many of us, the start of the COVID 19 Pandemic here in the US, March 2020 was a huge pivot point for me; In my business and in my personal life. Within a matter of days I had to transition my group practice to an online forum making sure we were HIPAA compliant and that clinicians and clients alike had private spaces to do therapy. A tiny corner of my bedroom became my office and that is where I saw clients, while my kids tried to engage in online school and my husband and I tagged team our work hours. It was a bizarre shift in that now clients were seeing into a bit of my life – my physical space and at times hearing my family in the background. And I too got to see a different lens into my client’s worlds – their homes and family members. Plus it was a time that I was experiencing a lot of the same anxieties and emotions that my clients were, so even the clinical work looked a little different. COVID 19 also brought an increase in clients as many people were looking for extra support so I hired additional clinicians and expanded the practice a bit. In addition to that, a colleague and I were in the midst of publishing a book called Working with Worry: A workbook for parents on how to support anxious children. So it was a time where I was having a lot of professional growth which required more hours of my time, more energy, and more focus while my family also needed more so it felt like there were constant pivots.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.mlktherapy.com
• Instagram: @askable_mama
• Facebook: Askable Mama
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissakilbride

Image Credits

Portrait by Liza Harbison