We recently connected with Sara King and have shared our conversation below.

Sara, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear about the things you feel your parents did right and how those things have impacted your career and life.

My parents are reliable, loving, hardworking, and joyful. My parents encouraged my siblings and I to challenge ourselves and normalized the challenges we experienced. They both have a wonderful sense of humor so while we did experienced hardships they often encouraged us to view these experiences in a multi-faceted way and see how there may be some levity or joy present in the challenge, the irony of it, or the opportunity to have the experience in the first place. I believe this perspective inspired me to help my client’s view their challenges as a way of developing tenacity and perspective. My parents leaned heavily into a growth mindset and while they did not disregard the difficulties we experienced they emphasized how these things could increase our tolerance for challenges in the future and help create confidence in our ability to overcome.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m a mental health therapist. I was drawn to this work at a young age because as I witnessed people, or experienced struggle myself, I often wanted to find a way to lesson it. What has been inspiring to me as I continue to develop in my career, is the awareness that the difficulty I experienced is often layered and my experience of suffering increased or lessoned based on how I responded to it. In my teenage years and early adulthood, I did a lot to avoid difficult situations/emotions/experiences in my life through various means of avoidance or levels of disassociation. Unfortunately, I found that instead of helping me live a more meaningful and joyful life, I was left feeling increasingly aimless and discouraged. I found I was often doing things that I thought I “should” be in order to be happy but I was not finding them to be enjoyable. I began to practice yoga because I heard it would be helpful to my fitness goals, specifically as a supplement to the running I did frequently. I then pursued a yoga teacher training because I thought it would be a cool accomplishment and I liked the image a yoga instructor seemed to have in our culture. During this training, I began to sense what my body was experiencing physically and emotionally and was encouraged to “stay with it” versus avoid it or push through it to achieve something. This practice of being with myself supported me in beginning to understand my emotions and the usefulness of feeling them as a way to indicate what was important or mattered to me. I found it especially helpful to notice the way my body experienced emotions because it provided space to “feel” them instead of think or rationalize my experience of them. I found that as I stayed with them I was able to increase my understanding of what I needed to be supported in my experience. This was a stark difference from what I had practiced prior which was more an avoidance of, versus a being with myself. I find this willingness to be with myself and encouraging my client’s to do the same to be the most healing and supportive element of the therapeutic process.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I had to unlearn the lesson that challenges are meant to be overcame instead of experienced. As I mentioned earlier my parents encouraged challenge, but I believe the way they, and myself, often experienced them was as something to get through and to feel proud of surviving. While I think there is some truth to the narrative of pride in survival and having tenacity, I find that it is most supportive of myself if I honor that I am having a difficult time, I hold space for that difficult time, I normalize it, and I recognize it is a gift to acknowledge the multi-faceted nature of my human experience. This allows me to deepen into my experience versus wanting to rush through or avoid it and often highlights for me both the challenges and the gifts present in any situation.

If you could go back, would you choose the same profession, specialty, etc.?

Maybe, I love it a lot and I find it to be such enjoyable and inspiring work, but I also have the desire to experience a lot of different careers just to see what they would be like and how I would handle them.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.sarakingcounseling.com
• Other: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapists/sara-king-rogers-ar/466420