We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Rebecca Clegg. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Rebecca below.

Rebecca, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Was there a defining moment in your professional career? A moment that changed the trajectory of your career?

I began and spent the better part of the first decade of my career doing traditional psychotherapy before I came to the work I do now as a holistic psychotherapist and somatic healer. Holistic psychotherapy refers to an integrative approach that incorporates both traditional and non-traditional treatments to help people heal. Rather than viewing a client as someone who is “sick” or needs to be “fixed” (neither of which are true), it takes a look at the whole person. It considers mental, physical, and spiritual elements that influence a person’s wellbeing as they work towards healing.

Often times, talking alone isn’t enough to help our clients move out of a stress or trauma response. So, when talk therapy isn’t the right intervention, we have to look for other ways to help people regulate themselves back to a calm state where they are able to feel present again.

I saw this play out time and time again as I was doing traditional therapy. So many highly-motivated, intelligent clients would find themselves feeling stuck and unable to change despite total commitment to our work together. They would feel frustrated and, often times, personalize their inability to change as an indication of their worth, or lack thereof. I knew this was not the case and that what was blocking their progress was something unconscious. No amount of insight was going to help them, and I knew I not only wanted, but needed, to learn alternate ways to help people heal.

This led me to the last decade of my life, where I have been training and studying somatic healing as a way to go beyond talk therapy and break through subconscious patterns of sabotage. As I walked through the world of somatic therapy, I was overjoyed, and often overwhelmed, by the vast array of healing modalities available out there and found that I was being inevitably compelled to expand my skill set to help more people, as well as open up the conversation about the mind-body connection and how important it is to include the whole person in the healing process.

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 an author, consultant, speaker, and holistic psychotherapist. I have worked for 20 plus years as a therapist and I am the Founder and Clinical Director of Authentic Living Counseling and Wellness. Authentic Living Counseling and Wellness is a group practice of somatically-trained and trauma-informed therapists and healers.

Early in my career, I worked in clinical mental health settings and went on to create my private practice specializing in work with women recovering from disordered eating and body image concerns. I am a certified eating disorder specialist and supervisor, and I train clinicians around the world in providing trauma informed, body-based healing to their clients. My clinical practice has expanded to helping all people heal their bodies from the effects of trauma and chronic stress. I combine the principles of behavioral science, stress physiology, embodiment, and mindfulness to teach my clients how to reconnect with their body and how to work with their own nervous system to alleviate emotional and physical pain.

I have a deep passion for understanding human development and healing, and I am a committed life-long learner so that I can bring cutting-edge techniques into my work with clients.

Outside of the office, I have a strong desire to get resources to people who may not have access to counseling. As such, I have the pleasure of speaking to organizations and presenting nationally, educating families, clients and clinicians on eating disorders, nervous system regulation and mind/body approaches to healing. I am the author of ‘Ending The Diet Mindset: Reclaim A Healthy and Balanced With Food and Body Image’, a book designed to help people heal from our cultural obsession with body image and dieting (paperback and audio version available). I created the free online course, Your ‘Recovery Resource: A Program For Navigating Your Loved One’s Eating Disorder’ for the family and loved ones of those in recovery. And, I launched the Inner Alchemy Podcast, a series where I connect with all of my favorite healers and helpers in an effort to help people find the healing resources they need to reclaim balance in their own lives.

My hope is to share this human journey with you, as together, we do our part to remember who we really are and heal the collective whole.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I had to unlearn (and, truthfully, still am unlearning) the very lesson that I speak about on my podcast and on my social media channels — We are not human doings. We are human beings. We intrinsically possess masculine and feminine energies, and the key to healing is honoring our body as a means to come back to balance. Our bodies hold infinitely more wisdom than we could possibly imagine, and sometimes, being lost and turning inwards is the way.

You see, I thought when I got to the place I was heading, I would finally feel relief and joy – the ever anticipated exhale that one gets when they finally cross that finish line and can stop running and take some deep breaths. Not me. I felt none of that. I felt nothing really. Other than tired, exhausted, and unable to take joy in everything I had built and created over the last decade of my life.

I had just published my first book, ‘Ending the Diet Mindset’, which had been a lifelong dream of mine. The written word, and language itself, had always captured my heart and created a sense of connection to the world around me. I just knew I wanted to write.. I had created a successful career, and learned a tremendous amount about a subject near and dear to my heart, and so I poured it out into a book in hopes that it could be something in the world that could help make an impact. I completed a personal goal. Check. So here I was, at the finish line of a very personal and professional milestone, and nothing felt the way it was supposed to. This was new territory, terrifying and chalk full of doubt.

Which led me to pausing. Which led me to looking at myself, with curiosity and questions. Which inevitably led me back into therapy (yes, of course therapists go to therapy!). Which led me to realize that my relationship with doing would never change if I didn’t change my relationship with being.

Cultivating a relationship with being led me from a career focused on how we think about our life (traditional psychotherapy) to a career focused on how we are present – literally embodied – in our life (somatic psychotherapy).

Cultivating a relationship with being led me to realize I wanted less – much less – of everything but time and space. Cultivating a relationship with less led me to remember my love for creativity, exploration, and being in nature. It has led me to spending time in different spaces and places, both in the world and in my body. It has really changed everything, and I’m ever so grateful.

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

I have made many practical shifts in strategy over the course of my career. For example, I’ve outsourced my marketing and branding so that I had more time to pour into the work I’m equipped to do– help people heal and create alchemic conversation. I’ve increased my social media outreach which is super cool because I can reach people in small, but impactful ways I might never have been able to. I have been fortunate to cultivate a beautiful network in Atlanta that has led to referrals. But truly, it is not because I’m seeking them, so much as it is truly a community that fosters the trust necessary for the referral to occur. I find the less you seek to get, and the more you seek to connect, marketing just flows.

Honestly, including my own story in my marketing message has been an unintended “strategy” – in that it wasn’t a strategy at all – and yet I feel it draws the people who would work best with me to my work. None of us are perfect (not even your therapist!), and none of us are exempt from the ramifications of being a Human Being in a Human Doing world. We all fall victim to the “do more, chase more” narrative in our go-go-go culture, and we all forget to take care of our whole selves every now and again. By reminding people that I practice exactly what I preach— over and over again– I feel I’ve been better able to attract clients I am equipped to walk alongside in their healing journey.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.rebeccaclegg.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/beccaclegglpc
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/beccaclegglpc
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/becca-clegg-lpc-ceds-s-5116a019
• Other: https://open.spotify.com/show/2n5DgR1oj8bST9C1JvAL1V?si=84834c0c9bc14d67