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

Brittaney, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear the story behind how you got your first job in field that you currently practice in.

The interesting thing about the psychotherapy field is we have to get volunteer experience before getting jobs that pay us. I started volunteering in the mental health world at 19 while in community college.

The first place I worked was an equestrian therapy practice. I helped kids with severe cognitive disabilities learn to use motor skills and understand communication through horse riding and playing games on horses. A lot of psychology classes in college required some level of volunteering in the field. I think it was to get people to understand if they could enjoy/do the work. I honestly had so much fun working at this practice! The kids I was seeing were the most severely challenged I have ever worked with- they couldn’t care for themselves and needed to be in wheelchairs, and most of them were lucky enough to have caretakers outside of the parents of some sort so they could get constant help.

One of the biggest challenges as a young therapist is building the emotional tolerance to see and hear tragic things you’ve never encountered. I did realize I was able to hold hope and find pieces of progress even with such an emotionally challenging population.

At this time, I wasn’t serious about the psychology field. I was going to community college with a minor in psychology and a dance major. I thought I wanted to be a professional dancer and worked a lot in the service industry as a server in a BBQ restaurant. I didn’t decide to pursue psychology full-time until I started in the last two years of my bachelor’s degree; that’s when I realized that dancing was not the stable career I desired.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I help teens and adults who have experienced trauma, have anxiety, and/or are in the lgbtq+ community better manage their emotions. I help people work through trauma from abuse, grief, loss, identity, and self-esteem to find ways to thrive in the world. I have experienced several traumas myself & have gone through my journey of coming out. I know what it’s like to numb pain and survive daily. I help people get out of the cycle of just surviving to think more clearly, make decisions in life more effectively, and communicate in better ways.

I help people move from acting from a place of guilt, obligation, and fear into making choices based on wants, needs, and desires. I help people find their worth and build confidence to live authentically. In turn, they are creating healthier and more fulfilling relationships with others and, at the same time, deconstructing societal messages to end generational trauma.

I feel confident in taking on clients who experience complex traumas, who feel intense emotions, and who get turned away from other therapists. I thrive working with more “challenging” clients. I hold a nonjudgmental space for those who live much differently than the rest of society, such as the LGBT community.

I feel like I can connect with these clients not just because of my learning and my work experiences but also because of my personal experiences.

As a child, I was born into divorced parents, and later, I experienced my parents go through two more divorces. I experienced child abuse from one parent, neglect from another, and emotional neediness from a third. I grew up needing to fit into a box to feel conditional love. These childhood experiences lead me to find other abusive relationships in my teen and adult years. During my junior and senior years of high school, after one of the divorces, my family experienced poverty. We received food donations, church contagions for bills, and decided electricity was unnecessary for a year. This experience created a different viewpoint on money and led me to do various types of hustles to get by and get an education. Throughout all of this was my journey of coming out as bisexual and polyamorous. It was a trip that I spent my whole life coming to terms with and fighting shame to be out and proud.

When I was unhealed, I coped with my trauma through substance use, people-pleasing, not having boundaries, and holding onto toxic relationships out of fear of abandonment. Through a lot of therapy and continuous self-work, I’ve learned to express my needs, build more meaningful relationships, establish boundaries, create healthier habits, and find ways to live a sober and authentic lifestyle. I continue to work on myself to use my pain as power. Through my journey, I want to help others overcome various struggles to live life where they are in the drivers seat.

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

To be successful as a therapist, you need two things: 1. You have done/are doing the work to go through your healing and therapy. 2. You need to show up like a real person in session and let go of shame or who society tells you a therapist “should be.”

If you haven’t done either of these, you can cause more harm. If you don’t work on yourself, your triggers and biases can come up in session and either create harm, or the client can start to become the one taking care of you. If you don’t let go of shame and hide behind all of the professional labels, how are clients supposed to be confident and live an authentic life without shame?

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

I’m a trauma survivor and a person in recovery. I’ve had a lot of unlearning I’ve had to do to be where I am today. The one I’ll pick to talk about is one of my favorite topics: the unlearning of people pleasing.

This really has shown up in so many ways, from constantly being afraid to ask my roommate to clean up after themselves for fear of conflict, to trying to be a person my partners wanted be to be, to hiding my bisexual identity from my family. I constantly knew how to hide my feelings, bury them way down, and do what I thought everyone wanted me to do so I would be liked and I wouldn’t cause problems. I really thought I needed all of these people to see me in a certain light or they wouldn’t like me. I didn’t have boundaries at all!!

Contact Info:

• Website: YourTherapyRooms.com
• Instagram: Brittaney.Does.Therapy
• Other: If you want to book a FREE 15 minute introduction call you can schedule at: yourtherapyrooms.com/contact