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

Becca , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. When you’ve been a professional in an industry for long enough, you’ll experience moments when the entire field takes a U-Turn, an instance where the consensus completely flips upside down or where the “best practices” completely change. If you’ve experienced such a U-Turn over the course of your professional career, we’d love to hear about it.

Forward movement requires modern tools, is not the statement you hear when you attend graduate school for social work.

It’s also not the statement you hear when you get into the field.

It’s not the statement you hear as a client.

Which is why I decided to shift the way we view healing mental health.

The mental health field as a client and as a therapist always made me feel like I was failing because truthfully, I was never “fixed”. My symptoms were always managed through they always came back. I felt like each time I re-entered therapy it was because I was doing something wrong. It wasn’t until I became a therapist specializing in working with people who had been in therapy before, that I saw how much the system made my clients feel exactly like I did: hopeless, alone and never knowing if and when you would be “better.”

This realization gave me permission to shift the entire way that I worked as a clinician. I decided to stop trying to help my clients get better and instead understand that better doesn’t mean fixed, it means recognizing patterns and feeling empowered in your choices to choose differently. I decided to offer coaching as a way to transition from therapy into a more goal-oriented form of practice, offering direct feedback and focusing on allowing a client to take what they know to cultivate their future rather than repetitively bringing their past forward. I also offered them permission to transfer between coaching and therapy depending on where they were in their own personal work.

2 years later this experiment became the foundation for a new way to view how we heal. I created my Forward Model of Change™ that supports clients through 4 phases of processing which offers new formats, tools, and supports clients as they change.

Becca , 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 life looked pretty normal, but the truth is I grew up feeling pretty broken. Like most clients who enter therapy, I used my coping skills to survive, and built the life I thought our society expected from me.

I had two loving parents and lived in middle-class suburbs. I was valedictorian of my high school class and graduated with honors from college. I went to graduate school and started a successful mental health practice.

However, for most of my life, no one saw my internal struggles, family trauma, or generational patterns. I started therapy when I was 9 years old, experiencing regular panic attacks and a refusal to do anything that left me feeling out of control.

This therapist taught me about anxiety, then called me fixed and saw me out. I was in and out of therapy in middle school, high school, and college, experiencing the same cyclical treatment every time. I felt like a failure. I had graduated from therapy, so I shouldn’t be back again.

I was on an endless loop of healing but never really healing forward. I was referred to medication and misdiagnosed in a psych ward instead of being supported in learning about myself. I was treated for my disordered eating, without examining my trauma.

The system let me down.

I became a therapist so I could support people in ways I wasn’t supported, and created the Forward Model of Change™.

Mental health has never been about forward movement — until now.

We know that when you graduate therapy, it doesn’t mean you don’t need support. We know that lasting change comes from shifting generations of patterns, not diagnosing a condition. And we know that sometimes you need nurturing and other times you need a nudge to get you where you want to go.

With a commitment to show up in our humanness so you can too, my business Forward Healing Therapy and After-Therapy™ offers you permission to shift your patterns and propel yourself forward so you can reclaim your identity.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

As a social worker you are trained to step into a role that you are capable of supporting anyone that walks into your office because that is the expectation. I had to unlearn the idea that I can help everyone. Social worker’s are often made to feel like what we know to be true about ourselves, our limits, and our capabilities do not actually matter. The idea that I can’t help everyone is something that I come up against daily. It’s something I see my team struggle with on a regular basis as well.

I’ll never forget the first time I told a supervisor the client I was seeing was not a good fit for me. They asked me to explain , I did. They told me that it’s my responsibility to do my work to keep supporting my client. The reality was no matter how much self-development work I did, I was not going to be able to help them meet their goals because their goals were not aligned with my values.

It took me a long time to learn that I am allowed to have values that drive the way that I work with others and the consequence is that I won’t be able to work with everyone. As I took the time to unlearn this and put into practice owning who I was as a person, I noticed I lost clients but gained more clients I actually enjoyed working with. Clients were more honest in session, they spoke more openly about their own values, and they shared with me that our time together was more impactful because they saw I was a human too.

The concept of a blank slate therapist isn’t what clients are seeking anymore. Clients are seeking raw, real, human connection that allows them to see parts of who they are in the person that is helping them heal. The end result of working with this knowledge is being able to tolerate you won’t be able to help everyone heal BUT you will be able to help those who connect with you heal more fully.

Putting training and knowledge aside, what else do you think really matters in terms of succeeding in your field?

I wish someone would have told me being able to trust my gut was more important than any training I could take.

There is a moment in the field of mental health where something shows up in your office you are not equipped to deal with because truthfully there isn’t any training on it. Most of the time these moments are basic human interactions – a client asks you about your family, you run into your client in the bathroom, you learn you are actually seeing 2 best friends who are fighting, your clients get diagnosed with a terminal illness, and/or life just happens.

Sure, a training might give you an idea of how to navigate what circumstance is showing up but sometimes the training doesn’t account for the real connection you have built with a client.

I struggled with hyperemesis throughout my pregnancy. This meant I was often sick, canceling on clients last minute, and constantly rearranging my scheduling providing me enough time to throw up between clients. I had to eat during sessions to stop feeling sick and truthfully, I looked like I was sick all the time. My clients started to notice, they started becoming concerned and the “right answer” of processing why they were concerned didn’t feel authentic to me. It also didn’t ease their worries or create a safer container for them to open up in. My gut told me to be honest about what was going on. It told me I had to trust my clients were capable of knowing this information about me and the truth would ease them rather than hinder our relationship.
And it worked.

Did my clients regularly ask more personal questions as my pregnancy went on, absolutely, because they are humans seeking connection. Did it change our therapeutic dynamic in the negative, no. The feedback I got was \they appreciated me being honest because many people in their lives weren’t.

Learning to trust your gut means you are able to discern when something is right or wrong for the person. It also means you can admit when you have done something wrong and come back to repair it. A training isn’t going to help you know what makes the most sense for each human that walks into your space. We all have nuances that need to be seen and heard. A one size fits all approach isn’t what we need, which means we have to be able to trust our guts in each moment to help someone get where they want to go.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://forwardhealing.co/
• Instagram: @forwardhealing.co
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/forwardhealing.co
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/forwardhealingtherapyandafter/

Image Credits
Carley Jayne Photography & Wild Pines Collective