Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Olga Montgomery. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Olga, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with 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?

I opened Voyager Counseling when I had to decide where and how to return to work after maternity leave with my rainbow baby. While I was pregnant with my child I expected to take (and expected to only want) 8-12 weeks off… when my son was born, I didn’t want to return to work, but when he was five months old the realities of day-to-day life (bills, so forth) forced me to make a decision. I already had years of experience practicing Acceptance and Commitment Therapy as a medical social worker, I was a Licensed Clinical Social Worker, and I already knew and valued authentic self-practice: practicing personally what I practice professionally. In the face of uncertainty, a steep learning curve, and occasional discouragement, I chose to lean into a willingness leap of building my practice and creating Voyager Counseling as a radically compassionate space for women navigating loss in the midst of 20’s, 30’s, 40’s life.

Building this business required me to include myself in my own radical compassion. From a (highly uninformed) administrative perspective, I thought my main steps looked like: incorporate, tell others, do therapy, write clinical notes. My first year also included: learning web design, learning marketing, learning graphic design, learning about my community, hundreds of networking coffee dates, hundreds of instances of outreach for support to my community of friends and colleagues, and thousands of instances of self-care, self-soothing, self-boundaries, and self-encouragement.

If I were speaking to another woman in my shoes who has experienced loss, who is holding her rainbow baby, who is feeling pulled this way and pulled that way by the practical challenges of life and the impractical love of human connection, I would say: I hear you. I see you. You’re right, it is hard. You’re right, there is no one single correct path, and none of this is easy. You don’t have to start your business… you don’t have to not start your business. You don’t have to leap… you don’t have to not leap. I am sending you my care through these words to say, all of your inner experience has something to say, and your next right step is yours. Include yourself in your own attention, care, and compassion as you choose your path. They are all hard. Which hard path is one you’re willing to have?

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?

At Voyager Counseling, I help women hold grief, love, hope, and loss intentionally in this imperfect, finite, very human life. I am a Licensed Clinical Social Worker providing individual therapy, group therapy, group psychoeducational courses, free community peer support groups, & professional training. My colleagues and I at Voyager provide therapeutic services to women navigating life-altering loss in the midst of 20’s, 30’s, 40’s age-and-stage of life.

I am most proud of the heartfelt ways in which we practice radical compassion at Voyager as a professional team. We include ourselves in our own compassion. We take breaks when we are sick, we slow down with our kids, we get overexcited, we stress, we overfunction… we name it and we return to our own care. We are an imperfectionistic, radically compassionate group of women who know grief and provide expert, evidenced, process-based, depathologizing grief care. We reach out with warm hands of outreach and compassion to our community, locally and beyond.

It’s a wild ride, this Voyager Counseling thing. One paradox of grief and grieving which women share in our community is when grief pain is met with self-compassionate grieving, what was our stuck pain can become the loving soil which nourishes love and capacity we didn’t have prior to our loss. This has been my experience, too. Voyager is my love letter to the beloved beings and losses which have shaped my life and the community of women grievers I work with who, like me, choose to somehow, despite it all, lean into love in this complex, mortal, human life.

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

Human-to-human connection. At Voyager, we have grown our practice though organic connection and through cultivating intentional space. We work with women in their 20’s, 30’s, and 40’s who like the idea of “the village”, but more often like to “be the village”. Many women in our community have often felt embarrassed or overly vulnerable to share their hurt and imperfection around others–this makes sense, given our context, childhood messaging, social media, so forth. Yet grief and loss forces us to change. We at Voyager Counseling provide low-pressure, open-palmed, welcoming space to support women to arrive just as they are–their lives, their losses, their loves, and their grief. Our groups have organically connected women to connections with one another that can only be made in heartfelt community. One woman shared, “this was just what I needed, and I didn’t know I needed it”.

It’s this kind of experience that gets passed along. At Voyager, we know that grief feels so emotionally isolating, yet we also know mentally that we are not alone. Our grief care community grows through caring women sharing about the support and radically compassionate grief care they benefitted from, in the interest of benefitting others who need to know this kind of space and support exists.

Putting training and knowledge aside, what else do you think really matters in terms of succeeding in your field?

Self-practice. Authentic self-practice is vital for providing excellent behavioral healthcare, psychotherapy, and/or grief care. There is no replacement for the experiential learning of self-practice. Excellent person-centered care relies on more than intellectualized analysis and protocol alone–it requires the ineffable learning and experience of our own imperfect growth. Personally, I have found self-practice humbling, uplifting, and it has deepened my capacity for process-based connection in the moment. I continue to pursue self-practice in therapy, community spaces, as well as through organizing self-practice groups for clinicians. I offer free online professional peer consult groups at Voyager which incorporate authentic self-practice while maintaining a professional lens; I also organize and facilitate self-practice groups including peer consult and virtual book clubs at the Social Work Special Interest Group at the Association for Contextual and Behavioral Science.

There are many opportunities for self-practice. If you find yourself lacking–find some frustration with your relationships… look at your own mortality… and do something interpersonal that scares you! You will find plenty of grist for the mill of your professional success as a therapist in your own life when you choose to open yourself to it and meet it with authentic self-practice.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.voyager-counseling.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/voyagercounseling/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/voyagercounseling