We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jaime Carden-O’Brien. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jaime below.

Jaime, appreciate you joining us today. Was there a moment in your career that meaningfully altered your trajectory? If so, we’d love to hear the backstory.

As a trauma therapist, I always prided myself on the ability I had to prioritize my self care. I understood the importance of having and upholding strong boundaries, planning things to look forward to and not spreading myself too thin. I recognized this was important for my overall wellbeing as well as for the health of my personal relationships and to best serve my clients. I believed I was doing great! In 2014 though, I discovered personal development and I realized how much work I had to do. I began to dig into all the limiting beliefs I didn’t realize had been holding me back for so long. I went to different women’s events, read books. listened to podcasts and speakers; it was all amazing and life changing for me. I came home from a particularly inspiring women’s hike and shared with my husband how wonderful it was and how great it would have been to do this work and attend these kinds of things when I was younger. His response to me was, “Then create it!” And the idea of Free to Be was born. I realized that as females, we grow up thinking it’s normal to not like the way we look, to not feel good enough and have constant self doubt. We think it’s normal to engage in unhealthy competition with other females, to believe girls are “mean” and we can’t trust them to support us. We are told we have to be nice and accommodating to everyone, conflict is “bad” and we need to put others before ourselves. But none of these things have to be “true” to the girls we are raising today. We can teach them to call out diet culture that tells us we have to look a certain way to be worthy. We can teach girls about healthy competition and that one girl’s success is not another’s personal failure. We can teach girls about productive communication and conflict resolution instead of buying into the idea that “girls just love drama”. We can teach girls to be leaders and assertive instead of telling them they are bossy or a b*tch. And we can show girls that by investing in and being solid in themselves, they can take on the world! Females don’t have to wait until they are in their 30’s or 40’s to learn these things and do this work. They can start right now! And at Free to Be, they are doing just that!

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 am a Licensed Professional Counselor who has been in the field of helping people since I was 19 years old! I actually figured out I wanted to be a therapist because of a volunteer job I started in my freshman year of college. I volunteered at a crisis counseling center and was so inspired by the work, I declared my major as psychology and the rest is history! I see clients in my private practice 3 days a week and then I’m focused on Free to Be 3 days a week and I try to take that last day for me! In my therapy practice, I specialized in trauma for over 20 years and still do take on some trauma cases but now a days I work mostly with anxiety disorders. At Free to Be, we focus on strengthening self-esteem and confidence while teaching relationship skills and building a community of girls supporting girls. Girls as young as 1st grade come to our space to work on themselves and they get it! They already feel the pressure and they’re working to manage that so they may be the best version of themselves according to what feels best for them! Plus, they have a lot of fun in the process!

I truly feel proud of all the work I do and while I recognize the role I play in people making progress, whether in therapy or doing their personal growth work at Free to Be, credit belongs to my clients and the girls! Working on oneself is hard! Those who show up committed to make change in order to better their lives, they are the ones who need to be proud!

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

I originally started Free to Be for middle and high school girls. I had an amazing group of core girls who came to everything but the program wasn’t growing. I received great feedback from parents that their daughters felt protective of their time at Free to Be and it wasn’t something they wanted to “share” with friends. I appreciated the validity of their feelings and, without adding more girls, the business wasn’t going to survive! I put events for older girls on the back burner so I could brainstorm ideas to get more girls interested in coming. I decided to run some groups for elementary girls in the meantime, just for “fun” before going back to focusing on the older girls. But WOW! I was blown away at these young girls’ ability to open up about the same thoughts and feelings I was trying to target with the older girls! Plus, these younger girls were excited to bring friends and the groups continued to grow. I realized quickly that this work is important to start as young as possible and now these girls will grow up with us. Currently we offer classes for 1st to 8th grade girls but have offerings for the older girls again this summer!

Do you think you’d choose a different profession or specialty if you were starting now?

I absolutely would choose this same profession. I love what I do and being able to help people make positive change in their lives is incredibly rewarding. As Free to Be has grown, I’ve had people ask when I am going to stop seeing clients and I have no plans of stopping. Even if eventually I am not able to see as many, I always see myself having a therapy practice.

Free to Be for me has been pure joy and I can’t imagine not doing it! I hope one of my daughters will want to take it over but of course, that is up to them.

Contact Info:

• Website: freetobemovement.org
• Instagram: @free.to.be.movement
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/free.to.be.movement

Image Credits
Aubrey Weber with Aubrey Nicole Photography