We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Alexandra Rothschild a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Alexandra , thanks for joining us today. Setting up an independent practice is a daunting endeavor. Can you talk to us about what it was like for you – what were some of the main steps, challenges, etc.

I think the main advice I would a new therapist would be to get as much experience as possible with all types of clients before setting up your own practice. I learned the hard way and after three years of internships thought I was ready to start my own practice. Looking back I really wasn’t, I had a lot more to learn. When you are in private practice as a therapist you are very much on your own and although I still had a supervisor at the time I hadn’t really experienced anything difficult. So that first private practice experience didn’t work out for me, I moved to Colorado and I got my first job as a licensed therapist in a Community Mental Health Center. The work was difficult, rigorous and the ideal for burnout. There was a joke in the agency that no one makes it past 2 years because of so much burnout. I was overworked and underpaid. However, what I learned from that was self care as a therapist is non-negotiable. I could not have made it through the three years there, had I not learned to really take care of myself after work on a daily basis, before engaging with my partner, cooking dinner or enjoying the evening. I came home everyday and took a bath or shower with salt and then meditated for 20 minutes. This became something I had to do in order to do good work and also feel ok myself. I also think the other valuable thing about working in community mental health is you see all kinds of people from different backgrounds, cultures and with different types of issues and mental illness. I went in very naive and came out much more experienced, having had to put people on emergency holds in the hospital and with experience working with severe mental illness such as schizophrenia. I also learned about and became much more comfortable working with and identifying psychosis. So my advice would be to work in places similar to what I am describing, that maybe aren’t always comfortable places to work, but will give you all kinds of experience before starting a private practice.

Alexandra , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I am a trauma therapist and I have been practicing for about 20 years now. I started off just working with all issues and diagnoses and I was able to gain experience working with many different types of mental health struggles especially in Community Mental Health. I started to become frustrated, however, because when someone really had trauma it didn’t seem to help to just talk about it repeatedly, it actually usually made it worse, especially if it was old trauma. So I found EMDR and was trained in EMDR about 10 years ago. I am a huge fan and advocate of EMDR both from what I have seen it do for many many clients as well as my own experience with it. I encourage most clients I work with to try EMDR and use it for various types of trauma, experiences, childhood, current relationship issues and more. I have also recently leaned more into working with the maternal lineage and generational trauma, mother relationships either as an adult working through relationships with a mother or as a mother working through the difficulties, stressors and issues that can come up in motherhood. This includes a mother’s relationship with their own children, themselves in the transformational time of becoming a mother or with your own parents/children’s grandparents. I work with women in general going through transitional times such as motherhood/ matrescence, and perimenopause/menopause as these are times of great shifts, both in the body and mind. This can be a time when previous traumas or experiences come up that have not been previously worked through and very important times to work with nurturing and empowering someone around their nervous system.
I also work with supporting mother’s in processing their labor experiences and trauma. For some it may be that the labor/birth didn’t go as they had planned or expected, all the way to very difficult traumatic experiences during labor. Many women just sweep this under the rug once they are home with their baby, partly because they almost have to in order to carry on. Also, because they often don’t realize how much this is held in the body and can continue to come up in motherhood if not processed. The labor trauma can present around attachment trauma with the baby, detachment, anxiety, depression, or through nervous system dis-regulation. This can also show up in nightmares or sometimes just when you hear others talking about their own labor/delivery.
I love watching the transformation people go through when they really dig into their issues and trauma and ultimately shift their lives. They are able to find a feeling of safety in themselves. Supporting someone in building true confidence and resilience within is truly empowering for others and very rewarding work.

Do you think you’d choose a different profession or specialty if you were starting now?

Definitely. I love my job, love my profession, and I actually love working with trauma and the nervous system. I can’t imagine anything else I would choose instead and feel so grateful and lucky to both enjoy what I do and also be able to help others while doing it.

Training and knowledge matter of course, but beyond that what do you think matters most in terms of succeeding in your field?

I think there are a number of things that are helpful to succeed as a therapist. The main thing is to be able to take care of yourself first. I think a lot of therapists come into the field because they want to help people and they are natural caretakers but sometimes people who give a lot struggle to give to themselves or fill their own cup before supporting others. I really feel its critical for therapists to have their own self care and self regulating practices otherwise they will burn out. I also think both boundaries and empathy are of course important in this field. Both literal boundaries as in the ability to say no, as well as energetic boundaries, an ability to empathize during the session and then let it go and not take it home with you. I always tell people carrying others emotions doesn’t actually help those people and we each have enough of our own to deal with. This is especially true for certain types of therapy such as trauma therapy. Also, learning to touch into your intuition and to become comfortable with ‘not knowing’. As a therapist you have no idea what is going to come up, or come into your sessions each day, and the ability to be ok with that, and just trust yourself to ground, regulate and navigate the journey of each session as it comes is incredibly powerful.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.alexandrarothschildtherapy.com
• Instagram: @alexandrarothschildtherapy

Image Credits

Meghan Shalapin – Nested Photo