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

Jill, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about the best advice you’ve ever given to a client? (Please note this response is for education/entertainment purposes only and shouldn’t be construed as advice for the reader)

Being a parent in today’s world is hard. While it is of course filled with love and moments of wonderment, it can also be filled with a lot of pressure. With all the information that is out there today on parenting, we often end up getting overloaded with conflicting messages as well as a lot of advice. This advice, although well intended, might conflict with our own instincts and intuition.

I believe that as parents, trusting our intuit has become an increasingly difficult thing to do. There is a lot of pressure today to be the “perfect” parent. Real connection is about showing up fully and authentically for your child. It’s not about being the perfect parent and always knowing the right thing to do or say. It’s about creating a continuous and predictable relationship with your child. I believe that, if we let it, parenthood can become a spiritual journey. It is a practice that teaches and inspires us to look inward and grow as individuals.

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.

Absolutely! My name is Dr. Jill Campbell. I am a licensed clinical psychologist with over 25 years of experience specializing in maternal mental health, women’s issues, parenting, and life transitions. I completed my post-doctoral training at Cedars Sinai Early Childhood Center in Los Angeles where I worked privately and in groups with parents of infants, toddlers, and young children. For many years I worked for a group pediatric practice, conducting parenting workshops on a variety of child development topics. From 2014-2023, I served as the staff psychologist and parent & me curriculum director for The Pump Station and Nurtury™, a new-parent resource center in Santa Monica, CA. Today I have a private practice in Calabasas, CA where I conduct in-person and virtual psychotherapy and group sessions.

Through my experience and the many people I have worked with, I’ve learned to base my practice around what science calls the negativity bias. This is the notion that when we struggle, we are neurobiologically wired to make sense of our struggle by creating a negative story around it. The negativity bias often keeps us feeling defeated, broken and not good enough. Through my work, I help clients learn the skills and tools to create a more constructive narrative for themselves. Rewriting our stories allows us to stay centered and open-minded, so that we can live an authentic life with strength, resilience, and positivity.

When I first set out to get my master’s degree in psychology, I was interested in working with young children. I had been an intern at a therapeutic nursery school in New York and loved the work. During my master’s program at NYU, I ended up taking a course in the psychology of women that was really eye-opening for me, and my passion for working with women’s mental health began to grow. I began working with women suffering from body image issues and eating disorders. It didn’t all come together to what I do now until my daughter was born 26 years ago. Having her and going through the experience of being a new mom is how the marriage between working in early child development and women’s mental health came together.

When I had my daughter, I was one of the first of my friends to have a baby. I was also a new stepmother (my stepchildren were 8 and 11 when my husband and I got married). I had never had a baby in the house, and I felt isolated, overwhelmed, and vulnerable. I had recently obtained my doctorate degree and a colleague of mine suggested that I do an internship at Cedars Sinai early childhood center. As a post-doctoral intern, I listened to other new mothers like me talk in group, and I heard similar stories over and over again. I remember moms sharing their feelings of both joy and sheer terror and the other moms nodding in unison. The group was a haven, and it is what inspired me to make working in the field of maternal mental health my career for the last 26 years.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

Oh boy- I love this question. I grew up in a perfectionist household. While I know my parents did their absolute best with the tools they had, they were very image focused and put a lot of value on what other people think. Although I am sure it was not their intention, they taught me perfectionism. Well-known researcher and author, Brené Brown, verbalized it best when she said, “A perfectionist believes if I look perfect, live perfect, and work perfect, I can avoid or minimize criticism, blame, or ridicule. But in reality, perfectionism keeps us from being seen.” It also leads to a ton of self-criticism, anxiety, and the belief we are never enough.

Unlearning perfectionism has been one of my biggest life’s lessons, and while I have come a very long way, I will forever be a recovering perfectionist. I believe going through the process of unlearning perfectionism has afforded me the wisdom, tools, and authenticity to help many of my clients that come in with similar challenges.

I see many parents in my private practice grapple with trying to be the perfect parent. While we all intellectually know that perfect parenting does not exist, we still struggle with the expectation of never making a mistake. We need to make peace with the fact that there will always be a difference between the idealized image of the perfect parent our heads, and the reality of the parent we are. We need to know that who we are is enough, and we can’t make parenting decisions based on our own core values if we are too caught up in caring about what other people think.

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

While I see my overall career path as having grown organically from pursuing my interests and passions, I did experience a pretty big pivot back in 2020. I had been working full-time as the staff psychologist for The Pump Station and Nurtury™ when the pandemic hit. Due to the changes that the pandemic forced on the business, my employee status, salary, and role at The Pump Station became affected. I went from being a full-time to part-time employee with ½ the pay while we were all on lockdown. At the time, I hadn’t been in private practice since 2006, and a lot had changed! Not only was I trying to navigate the world of virtual psychotherapy like so many of my colleagues, but I was also trying to create a brand-new practice during a time where typical forms of networking and outreach were not available. As challenging as that time was, I learned I was more resilient than I thought. Sometimes these lessons are forced on us- we learn them while kicking and screaming. Eventually I realized how much I had missed having a private practice. I took online classes on how to conduct HIPAA compliant telehealth therapy, built a website, found a HIPAA compliant EHR (electronic health record) software company to host my sessions, created all the essential paperwork, etc.

As time went on and my practice continued to build, I was also facing on-going disagreements with my boss at The Pump Station. It was taking on toll my mental health, and I was realizing that if I was going to help my clients to live an authentic life, then I had to have the courage to walk away from someone that I no longer aligned with. Another big pivot to face. Starting a new path can be scary, but I truly believe we are all worthy of creating the life we want.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.drjillcampbell.com
• Instagram: @dr.jillcampbell
• Other: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapists/jill-c-campbell-calabasas-ca/1074958 https://psidirectory.com/listing/jill-c-campbell-psyd.html