We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Empowered Healing Dallas Danica Harris, Ph.D., SEP & Brittany Escuriex, Ph.D.. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Empowered Healing Dallas below.
Hi Empowered Healing Dallas, thanks for joining us today. We’d love to hear about how you went about setting up your own practice and if you have any advice for professionals who might be considering starting their own?
Hi, we’re Danica Harris and Brittany Escuriex, the founders and co-owners of Empowered Healing Dallas. We originally met in 2016 when we were staff therapists within a large organization. We felt an immediate connection, both personally and professionally, and that year really set the stage for us later founding Empowered Healing Dallas. Within that shared work environment, we often connected around issues of social justice and equity, and we loved challenging one another to grow as therapists and humans. We began to feel more constrained by working within a system, particularly given how these larger systems often perpetuate hierarchy and inequity. We started talking about what it could look like to build our own practice, create an enriching and empowering workplace, and provide therapy that is truly congruent with who we are as therapists and people.
In fall 2018, the time felt right to take a leap and start the practice. We found our first office space, leased it almost immediately, and dove right into getting the business established. By January 2019, we were seeing our first clients and beginning to create our own work culture. The first year of the practice was just us, and about a year later our friend Sapna joined us and it felt like a really great trio. When the pandemic hit and the three of us rapidly shifted to teletherapy services for all of our clients, we weren’t sure how this might impact our newly formed business. What we found is that more people needed mental health services, and more therapists wanted to provide teletherapy now that everyone was becoming accustomed to that option. Now, Empowered Healing Dallas has 14 therapists and a full-time practice manager, and we couldn’t be more proud of our team.
Starting this business was one of the greatest decisions each of us has ever made, and we’re incredibly grateful for how things have developed in the past four years since we started the practice. In graduate school, we were taught how to be therapists, but not how to be business owners. This seems to be common for many folks who wind up in private practice – we know how to do the work of being a therapist, but the work of owning and operating a business just isn’t part of our formal education. In this way, we needed to learn a lot, and pretty quickly – this process was simultaneously exciting and filled with learning curves. We also both worked other full-time and part-time jobs while getting the practice off the ground, so while this was an exciting time, we were also very busy. Given the nature of our work, it takes time for potential clients to find us, to get a caseload built, and to be ready to transition fully into private practice. While challenging at times, the process of creating and building the practice solidified our investment in the business, our partnership, and our clients. We feel so grateful to support our communities, offer accessible and affirming clinical care, and work with like-minded people who are dedicated to an environment free of workplace trauma. While being an entrepreneur can be challenging, we continue to feel grateful and humbled on this journey.
Empowered Healing Dallas, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
Empowered Healing Dallas is a psychological group practice where we provide therapy services for adults and adolescents and consultation and training for other professionals. We have some wonderful therapists who work within our practice, and we are so grateful to share space with such passionate and talented clinicians. While we have various clinical specialties and issues we address, we’re most proud of the values we collectively share and the intentions we set around connecting with our clients.
As a practice, we are social justice-informed, meaning we value and affirm all cultural identities, and explicitly integrate discussions of identity into our work. We recognize that mental health is impacted by the socio-political climate, experiences of oppression, and other factors connected to one’s various identities; we consider it vital to affirm folks’ experiences and create an open space to process these experiences. Our entire practice is also trauma-informed, meaning we recognize the broad range of traumatic events our clients might have experienced, and intentionally work to sit alongside our clients as they find safety, healing, and empowerment in recovering from trauma. Finally, our practice is deeply invested in the relationships we form with our clients – we consider ourselves humans first and therapists second. We foster connections with our clients that are rooted in authenticity, transparency, and equity. All of these values create deep and meaningful relationships that are truly transformative.
Within this general framework, our practice specializes in complex trauma, intimate partnership and relationship counseling, people-pleasing, perfectionism, identity development, identity-based trauma, family-of-origin concerns, mind-body wellness, and more. We love sharing our knowledge with others, so we offer training and consultation related to these areas, as well. Something we are really proud of is the additional training our therapists seek out in order to be better equipped in their work with clients. Many of our therapists have advanced training and skill in Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, IFS, EFT for Couples, and Mindfulness.
Last year, we formed a second business, The Empowered Therapist, LLC, stemming from Danica’s popular Instagram page @theempoweredtherapist. Our intention with The Empowered Therapist is to offer coaching and consultation services worldwide. Through The Empowered Therapist, Danica has launched self-paced healing courses, we are hosting our first in-person healing retreat in April 2023, and we have big plans to offer even more in-person and virtual events for those looking for extra support in their healing.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
Like so many business owners, we had to quickly and radically shift when the pandemic began. Prior to Covid, we both had a couple of clients who were virtual, but the bulk of our practice was built on in-person sessions and the sense of connection that occurs in the intimate therapeutic space. Overnight, we had to figure out how to not only see our clients virtually, but also run and maintain the business virtually. Understandably, many of our clients were unsure what therapy would feel like through a screen, and we were right there with them! We had to navigate the technology of this shift, while also figuring out how to still create a sense of safety, connection, rapport, and trust through teletherapy.
Additionally, we were navigating therapy during unprecedented times, providing support to our clients through multiple collective traumas. None of us were trained in how to provide therapy during a pandemic, so we frequently consulted with one another about how to support our clients in the best way possible. Having that frequent connection and consultation on the team was vital, as we all learned together how to ensure we were showing up for our clients as fully as possible during incredibly challenging times. We look back on that time with a lot of appreciation – we brought on so many new clients who have only ever worked with us virtually, and we trust our team has continued to provide amazing therapeutic support even while navigating a totally new landscape. We also experienced exponential growth in the business during the pandemic, bringing on multiple new therapists and a full-time practice manager. To some degree, it felt like we were pivoting constantly, learning how to on-board new team members, effectively market a growing practice, and create cohesion among our staff while working completely virtually. We think our ability to pivot and be flexible is really key to the success of the practice, as we’re always learning and shifting our approach to ensure our clients have the best and most supportive experience possible.
Any advice for managing a team?
We are incredibly fortunate to have an amazing group of people working within the practice, and we are intentional about creating a work environment that feels fulfilling and supportive for our whole team. Coming from systems where we experienced times of feeling unappreciated or unsupported, we started the practice with a clear vision of creating a work environment in which people feel empowered, supported, and deeply valued for their perspectives and contributions. We have such an awesome team, with diverse lived experiences and professional areas of skill and expertise, while we also share deeply held core values related to social justice, equity, and trauma-informed care. We strive to give our team autonomy to be themselves, both personally and professionally, and we deeply trust and value everyone who is part of Empowered Healing Dallas. Minimizing power differentials is important to us, as we know that everyone on the team has wisdom to share, and that we are all in a process of learning from one another. We are also intentional to create connection time that isn’t only about the work we do. Our team meets weekly for consultation, and it’s not uncommon for us to talk about our pets or the latest reality TV show. We do serious work, so moments of laughter and levity are welcome. We are deeply committed to creating a work environment that feels empowering and sustainable, and know that our awesome team members are part of what makes that possible.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://empoweredhealingdallas.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/empoweredhealingdallas/ and https://www.instagram.com/theempoweredtherapist/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100076947116159 and https://www.facebook.com/theempoweredtherapst
- Other: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@empoweredhealingdallas?lang=en
Image Credits
Madeline Faye Photography