We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful AIMEE MONTERROSA. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with AIMEE below.

Hi AIMEE , thanks for joining us today. Was there a defining moment in your professional career? A moment that changed the trajectory of your career?

I was working in a domestic violence shelter, the overnight shift, I was sitting in the office, it was around 2am and a client knocked on the door saying she couldn’t sleep. I had her come in and offered to chat with her a little bit to help ease any anxiety she was feeling. This was before I even went to graduate school, my first job in the field. We spoke for about 45 minutes and she stated she felt better. I was walking around the shelter doing a safety check and remember pausing and realizing this was exactly where I needed to be. This work, as an advocate and counselor was exactly what I felt called to do. I left that conversation with that client feeling like I had stumbled into my purpose. The next shift, my supervisor said that the client reported feeling like someone had finally treated her like a human being and offered empathy and a safe space to talk about her experiences without feeling shamed or judged. It was validating and further ignited a passion in me related to helping folks heal from trauma and giving voice to folks who never felt they had they opportunity to speak safely. I didn’t know then what the career would look like for me but this was definitely the moment I knew I was on the journey to creating safe space for folks to heal.

AIMEE , 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?

My name is Aimee, and I am a LA native with Mexicana and Salvadoreno roots, I am a survivor of trauma and violence myself and truly believe that healing is possible when you create safe spaces for folks to process and learn healthier ways to cope. Without reconnection of the mind + body + soul it’s hard to thrive. I wanted to create a practice that provided access to healing tools that feel practical and easy to incorporate in everyday life. I started working in the field of Domestic Violence and Substance Use with previously incarcerated and unhoused folks and developed a passion for empowering people to find their voice and ability to feel joy again. I believe the joy and healing are everyday practices that we can develop to help keep us well. Sometimes clinical work is delivered with a formal and less personal style and that never resonated with me, so I strive to create a space that feels warm, light and hella grounded. I specialize in grief, trauma and chronic depression and my work is centered in making sure people feel seen, heard, acknowledged, and cared for. I provide clients with the space to re-discover themselves and create a life that feels authentic and full of more ease. I provide easy to digest tips that help clients feel grounded through all the challenges life can throw our way. I am proud to be Latina and proud that my practice is 90% black and brown folks looking to reclaim wellness for themselves and live more full and joyful lives. I combine different formal modalities with my love of plants, nature, walking, music, writing and other holistic approaches. I am fully fluent in Spanish and provide services in Spanish as well, I am very proud of that! I want to normalize talking about mental health and wellness and encourage folks to prioritize their wellbeing and incorporate simple tools and practices into everyday life. My goal is to be more grounded, create more joyful moments and provide a safe space for others to feel rooted in themselves, grounded when interacting with the world around them and able to cultivate more moments for joy and true self nurturing and care. Current events bring with them an overwhelming heaviness, my mission, is for us to learn how to put that baggage down and give ourselves moments of real peace.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Between 2019-2022 I lost four important mother figures in my life, my last living grandmother, my aunt that I had a very close relationship with, my godmother, and a childhood friend that was a mom-figure in the neighborhood and like an older sister/mom in my journey of adulthood. To feel so defeated and overwhelmed because of these back-to-back loses was very difficult to navigate. Even as a therapist with all the tools for coping and self-compassion, I had a very difficult time with feeling like myself again and moving out of a deeper depression that I hadn’t experienced since my teen/early twenties. Because of my own self-awareness, and ability to channel more resilient ways of showing up for myself, I was able to find the support I needed but also study more about grief and create a specialty in my practice for living with and growing through heavy and complicated grief and loss. My own resilience and commitment to being well lead me to recognize that after going through the pandemic and being a member, of this ever challenging, changing and sometimes really violent world, its vital to create these specific safe spaces. To help people navigate loss and embrace the way grief can be life changing by finding more resilient ways to cope, cultivating joy again and growing through life after loss was a testament to my own resilience and journey through these very life-altering experiences. I feel more resilient, more myself and so grateful that I get to help folks through something like heavy losses and changes to everyday life.

Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?

I recently had a former supervisee reach out to me and send me an article about the importance of love languages in the workplace and she stated that as a boss I really worked at understanding my team member’s love languages to create a safe work environment. I truly believe that as a leader of a team our job is to ensure that people feel seen, heard, acknowledged, experience fairness and feel safe. My goal in managing folks was to ensure people felt all these things and knew that as a leader I had their best interest at heart. There must be a balance between expectations/productivity and holding people’s humanity in equal importance. The recent years were hard on all of us and as a leader I wanted to make sure people felt cared for but also professionally nurtured. It takes times to develop trust and our actions and communication as leaders are how we build that with our teams and how we demonstrate to our teams how to build that with each other.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @thetherapistspot