We recently connected with Jose Medina and have shared our conversation below.

Jose, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Before we get into specifics, let’s talk about success more generally. What do you think it takes to be successful?

What I’ve found to be true for myself in operating two businesses (one being a small training startup) is that it takes equal parts persistence, and stubbornness. There’s so many forces out there that discourage small business startups, and what I found to be helpful wasn’t the kind of typical business plan that is painstakingly poured over, but action.

That action for me was researching what I needed to register my business, how to do my own accounting, how to pay taxes, etc. I was driven so much out of a need to do for myself, but my passion for learning helped me so much more. The first six months where I spent endless nights trying to understand how much to pay in quarterly taxes, what to budget for, what I could afford in business expenses/expansion wasn’t the exercise in fear I thought it would be. If anything, it excited me to keep growing, and try to do more (within limits). To that end, I think if your work excites you, it’s so much easier to just stay motivated to keep tending to it like you would any passion project.

Jose, 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?

I’ve known since high school that I wanted to be a therapist. I consider myself incredibly lucky to have known that early in my life. The goal was always to be in private practice, but the way I wanted to accomplish this shifted substantially over the course of my career. Nowadays I’m not just running my own practice, but I’m also training clinicians across the bay area in subjects like using video games in therapy, trauma work, and considerations for working with specialized populations (such as gay men). On that note, my practice has it’s own YouTube channel that’s still in it’s infancy, but will be kept going for at least 3 years with bi-weekly updates. The name for it was originally going to be “Video Games and Trauma”, but for simplicity sake I’m just expanding my original private practice name.

Though I wanted to be a therapist, I was convinced that I wouldn’t be able to make it happen. Whenever I would express my interest in the field, I would always be met with some form of incredulity. This in large part came from people whose biases predisposed them to think that only white women were allowed to practice therapy. I think there’s power in seeing people who don’t quite fit that mold in positions where we’re calling the shots, and doing it in a way that feels equitable to those we work with directly, and the communities we impact.

Though I had my own traumas to face in my journey to become a therapist, that didn’t necessarily stop me from pursuing my goals; no matter how far fetched they seemed at the time. I went from working in community mental health to my own private practice, drawn to working with post traumatic, and acute stress disorders that substantially destabilize folk’s understanding of the world, and themselves. Through a combination of psychoeducation, compassion, humor, accountability, and a very intimate level of understanding through first-hand experiences of trauma, I’ve been touched to witness the journeys of those who take the risk of starting therapy to begin with (full well knowing how hard it was to ask for help when I needed it myself).

When clients work with me, I’m not afraid to be transparent with them about my own insights, but I think there’s a way to do that that’s based in centering their experiences, and serves their goals. My clients know if they find me drawing from an experience in my past, that it’s going to link directly back to something I’m seeing in their own lives. This kind of conversational back and forth makes therapy feel much more alive for the folks I work with, and it’s something I try to impart in my training work as well.

My training work is what I’m most proud of. It’s not something that I ever imagined for myself, but it’s been such a blast to take part in. The way it came about was that a former supervisor needed to find some trainers to put on a schedule. She’d heard of my desire to explore training clinicians on how to use video games in therapy, but I had been talking about that for months at the time she needed folks. It never dawned on me that she would challenge me to assemble that training under the pressure of a deadline to present. I could have said no, but I assembled the training instead for presentation in October 2019; a presentation I was sure would be one and done. Then, COVID happened a few months later.

I remember receiving an email from my agency’s training director that an inquiry had come up about working with children through video games. The inquiry asked if they offered, or knew anyone that offered a training to work with youth through video games. I had just completed my presentation a few months prior, and thought that it wouldn’t do any harm to just offer it again to another agency. But it wasn’t just one agency. One became two. Two became three. Three became four, and so on. By the end of my digital zoom training tour, I thought to myself “why not just look into getting certified to offer continuing education units?”. And I did. The first even training I gave for CE units was so gratifying; if only for the fact that it served to validate how hard I worked, and how much trust my colleagues, peers, and supervisors put in me to get me to where I am. And that’s ultimately what I hope to impress upon anyone that I either serve as a therapist to, or work with. We’re much stronger together than we ever are apart.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

My path wasn’t a linear one at all! I enrolled in my masters six years later than I wanted to in enduring, and recovering from my own traumas, significant life disruptions that nearly derailed my academic career, and having difficulties just getting my most basic needs met along the way with how expensive life was getting in the bay area.

The biggest obstacle I had was recovering from an addiction I developed to pain medications following a horrific car accident. I was on so many different pain medications (all prescribed and necessary) for about eight months, and when it was time to ween off, I remember the hell I went through in feeling like every other drive (such as the need to eat, drink, sleep, etc.) now came secondary to my addiction. The only thing that pushed me through it was imagining the people I was going to work with. The ones who might be going through something similar. The ones that I could empathize with when they go through their own struggles. My strength has always come from both the people I know, and the ones I hope to. I don’t see that changing, and I hope it never will.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

The biggest lesson I had to unlearn was to always strive to forgive and forget. I think for many of us, we’re taught through conventional wisdom that doing so leads to a path of enlightenment that is reserved only for those who can practice it with fidelity.

I think that kind of advice is dangerous, because it often led to me bury my own emotional experiences that I grew to accept were uncomfortable for others to listen to. Subscribing to that belief also wouldn’t help the folks that I work with because most of them have already gotten some version of that same invalidating mantra pushed on them.

We’re often so afraid of our own darkness that we never entertain how it tries to help us see ourselves better in the light. I know over time getting more acquainted and comfortable with my own negative emotions has helped immensely as the cognitive dissonance I used to operate with in some areas of my life has receded. That’s helped a lot with finding nuance in areas I previously only saw in black and white.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.wellmindssj.com/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jose-medina-139a131aa/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUiGI-f_ytJqI7MG4yVhX5A