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

Rachel, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. If you had a defining moment that you feel really changed the trajectory of your career, we’d love to hear the story and details.

My defining moment is a little different in that it wasn’t an event in my career that led to a shift, but an event in my personal life. It didn’t all happen at once, but getting diagnosed with breast cancer led to a huge shift in how I saw myself in the world. I had worked with tens and tens of clients affected by cancer, but now I was sitting in it myself. I was working as a liver transplant social worker in a hospital at that time. Less than a month into this diagnosis I was on my way to my first surgery, followed by fertility treatment, port placement, 4 months of chemotherapy, and a final surgery. When I was done with the ‘active’ phase of treatment, I knew with my whole being that I could not wait any longer to pursue a different kind of job within the field of clinical social work. I thoroughly enjoyed working in hospital settings, but I knew I wanted to work with people beyond crisis. I wanted to provide support on their way to healing in addition to the throes of crisis.

Imposter syndrome consistently got the better of me throughout the years leading up to the switch. Going through what I went through with cancer, I knew I had to lean into uncertainty. I made that decision to leave the world of hospitals and move into private practice instead. I guess my piece of wisdom here would be to face that unknown, the imposter syndrome, the fear, and do what you want to do anyway. Do not wait for something life-altering to happen before you change course towards something you’ve been meaning to. Uncertainty is, to some extent, ever-present, and so we need to live our truth and move towards what we want for ourselves.

Rachel, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I arrived at Boston University with plans to become a doctor. After a year, that plan changed, and that was thanks to chemistry. All jokes aside, I felt more of a pull towards mental health and public health. During freshman year of college, and every year thereafter, I taught health education to 9th and 10th graders in public high schools. I developed this kind of intense excitement and eagerness to de-stigmatize talking about one’s mental health. My own experience with mental health and seeing a therapist influenced my decision to choose this profession as well. As a mental health professional, you learn how to allow your personal experiences to inform your work without allowing it to cross any clinical boundaries.

I specifically decided to pursue a degree in clinical social work because of the wide range of possibilities as to where one can work. I wanted to have the option of working in private practice, schools, or healthcare. Social work training is different in that it places a unique kind of emphasis on honoring how a person’s world is shaped by larger unjust systems in the society they live in. It teaches us to examine how this part of a person’s life interacts with how they grew up, what they were surrounded by, the events that occurred in their lives, their nature/coping tendencies, and beliefs about themselves.

Part of the core of my framework is that many seemingly opposing thoughts and feelings can coexist. It is one of the reasons I love bringing in Dialectical Behavior Therapy into sessions when it is appropriate. I like to help move people out of black-and-white thinking towards a kind of thinking that can hold some variation of the spectrum in between. I have worked in the school setting, but also in healthcare systems, and now I have my own private practice as a therapist. How can I help? My specialty areas are psycho-oncology, fertility concerns/perinatal mental health, and trauma. What do these areas have in common? Grief. That’s where I come in. I have a deep capacity to hold someone’s grief while they experience it in its entirety and then learn how to live with it in their lives.

Have you suffered the loss of a parent? Have you experienced miscarriage, termination, a NICU stay, or birth trauma? Have you or your loved one gone through cancer and the devastation it causes? Do you feel alone, hopeless, invalidated or misunderstood in the grief you’re experiencing? While I am absolutely a therapist for those needing support through a life transition, navigating complex family dynamics, or wanting to improve their sense of self, my area of speciality is grief and all that comes along with it.

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

In May 2017, I lost my parents in a very traumatic manner. This happened just a few weeks prior to my graduation from the Master of Social Work program I attended. Very quickly, my world, my life, turned into despair and chaos. I flew back to California to be with my siblings and there began the journey into grief. I was faced with managing the legal logistics for my parents’ estate, emotionally supporting my siblings, making funeral arrangements, speaking with law enforcement, and finding some way to coexist with the grief. Therapy and my support system were life-saving protective factors that I’m grateful I had. After some time, I starting working as a clinical social worker in a hospital. Some may think that resilience is elasticity, or your capacity to ‘bounce back’. It’s not as simple as that. There were months that turned into years of agony, deep heartache, and feeling frozen. I just want others to know that being resilient does not mean that you have to hide what you are experiencing and show something different on the outside. Being resilient includes feeling paralyzed, feeling hopeless, feeling scared, sitting with it, working through it, and ultimately living whatever a full life means to you.

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

As a mental health professional, aside from our training/knowledge, I believe that a good sense of humor and openness to learning are most helpful for succeeding in this field. Even in the midst of trauma, heartbreak, sadness, disappointment, we have to leave some room for humor. Humor acknowledges our humanness. It also allows us to manage burnout. What we know about the human mind, body, and spirit is always growing and changing. Staying up-to-date with research, being curious about new therapeutic modalities, and always striving to advocate and educate are extremely important to success as a therapist.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.counselingbyrachel.com
• Instagram: @counselingbyrachel
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/rachel-prabhu-lcsw