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

Marilyn, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear the backstory of how you established your own practice.

I guess I always knew I wanted my own private practice. Getting there was quite the journey! I’ve always been an entrepreneur of sorts, and I always needed autonomy and independence. For me, I knew it wasn’t an option to work for someone else. A few values that I find essential that I recognized would be available to me if I had my own business are schedule freedom, individuality and a general sense of making it my own!
When I finished my internship as a pre-licensed therapist, next steps were to sit for the 4 hour licensure test, finding my own office space and creating and building my practice. I was clear from the beginning that I didn’t want to sublet someone else’s space as I wanted to make it mine….aesthetics are a huge part of what brings me joy and spending long stretches of my day there meant I needed it to be calming, nourishing and restorative. I also wanted to have a consistent landing space for my clients. I didn’t want them to have to shuffle from office space to office space.
So I set out on finding the perfect office space for me and two other colleagues. I was lucky enough to find something rather quickly that needed a minimal “build out” to make it a perfect therapeutic space. Then the fun part of furnishing, picking colors and creating the space for my clients and myself. I spent 5 years there before moving into my current space.
That was also a journey – waiting (for 5 years) for an ocean view office to become available in my current building. Once that happened and I finalized the lease, I had the joyful experience of designing it to be everything I wanted it to be, for myself and for my clients. So I made it a high priority to invest in furnishings that were calming and soothing and that really spoke to me. I’ve had wonderful, positive feedback from my clients who tell me on a very frequent basis how calming the space is and how wonderful they feel when they’re here.
I guess a recommendation for a young professional who is at this exciting point in their journey would be to make it yours! To whatever extent, to whatever capacity that means for them. Use the colors you like, buy the furnishings that you love, offer the amenities you want for your clients and ultimately build a space that you’re willing and excited to spend a good chunk of your life in. Take your time and look at other colleagues spaces, browse the Internet for inspiration and trust the process and most importantly, trust in yourself.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Let me introduce myself and my practice. I am a holistic psychotherapist whose practice is in Hermosa, Beach California.
Marilyn Ashley, LMFT & Associates. Holistic Therapy in Hermosa Beach. Please visit us at:
www.marilynashley.com
I like to say that I have taken a more modern approach to the old stuffy idea of therapy and joined it with some beautiful and newly understood models of healing. Holistic simply means taking all parts into consideration, and finding the balance across many different aspects. I also use the term holistic as a representation of the somatic (body-based) work and lens that I practice through. I’ve spent a great deal of my career furthering my work with education and trainings to further support my clients and at the same time, speak to me personally. I have found that perfect union with offering traditional talk therapy and integrating in somatic practices. The outcome has been tremendous!
Our bodies are a wealth of information and if we can learn how to ask the right questions and nourish it gently, then we can hear and feel the messages it’s trying to give us. Yes, there’s some amazing work that can be done with traditional talk therapy alone and so just imagine the deeper level of healing that can occur once we incorporate in the body! Some of these trainings have been certified breath work facilitator, meditation, sound healer, certified yoga, teacher, (CYT300), certified trauma informed therapist, somatic EMDR practitioner, and poly vagal and nervous system trainings.
In our sessions, you will find more approaches than just talking about your feelings. We may implement mindfulness exercises, sound healing, breath work, or movement to help you connect with your body and release any emotional blocks. Ultimately, my goal is to empower you with the tools and techniques that resonate with you and help you heal from within. My approach is holistic and somatic, meaning we will work with the mind-body connection to facilitate deep healing and understanding.
I embrace both the “top-down” approach and the “bottom-up” approach. This means we will work with your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors as well as your body’s sensations and responses. Your sessions may include a “top-down approach”, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), as well as “bottom-up” techniques like breath work, yoga, mindfulness-based somatic therapies, and nervous system education.
Lastly, a new offering I have recently included are “therapy intensives.” These are dedicated extended sessions that occur a few days in a row for multiple hours at a time. I have found it allows the space to enter into the work and stay there for a deep dive, gentle yet supported space to explore, learn and heal. In these intensives, we work together, finding what might support you the most and then we dig deep into learning these new tools. We will practice them together and fine-tune them to meet your specific needs. Therapy intensives are wonderful for anyone who might not have the time in their schedule to do weekly sessions or those who want to deepen the work already done in weekly therapy or for people who travel from out of the area to work with me specifically.

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

I absolutely would! In fact, I knew from a fairly young age that this was the career that I wanted to do and I made it a high priority to live “my” life before I jumped into this career. Meaning for me, I made it a point to travel extensively to learn about people and their cultures, their similarities and their differences. I wanted to live life and experience as much as I could before trying to guide someone on their own journey. And although it’s not a necessity or requirement that I have lived or experienced the exact thing as my clients, I am a huge believer of the idea that “you can’t take a client further than you’ve gone yourself.
I’ve done the hard work myself. I’ve been the client, feeling lost, hurt, grieving, ugly crying on the couch, being asked the really hard questions. Believe me when I tell you, I know what it’s like to be the one on the couch. And when I ask you the really hard questions know that I’ve been asked similar. I know with all of my essence what I am asking of you and together we will move through it. I have also examined where I wanted to make changes and seen how past events may have shaped who I had become and yet helped me realize that I could pivot at any point. Simple not easy!

Any advice for growing your clientele? What’s been most effective for you?

Networking, networking, and more networking! Especially in the beginning. Here in the Southbay, there’s a bunch of us therapists! And yet there’s plenty of clients for all of us!
The trick is how do you stand out? How do people find you? I not only network so people know about me, I also network so I know about them! Meaning when I have a client who needs a referral I want to have that referral for them quickly. I want to know who is my “go to” referral for whatever presenting issue. And probably most importantly, I don’t put my name behind a cold referral. I need to know with every ounce of myself that the referral that I am offering is idyllic for the person asking. I want to know this person, I want to know how they work, what modalities they use and I want them to know all of that about me.
Ideally face-to-face networking is my number one preference. If that’s not an option, a zoom call, possibly at the very least an email, introduction and correspondence with an effort to meet in person. I 100% do better one on one! Meaning, I’m not the therapist to go into a room and “work it.” I want to have a genuine, authentic deep connection with one person, rather than a bunch of small talk five minute conversations with many. This is how we get to know each other and this is how we build our network. My clients find me through my website, but also through word-of-mouth. Word-of-mouth through existing or past clients and word-of-mouth through my colleagues.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://marilynashley.com

Image Credits

Coastal Calm pictures in waiting room and behind the couch in my office.
https://jamielovelynn.com