We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Suzanne Walker, MSW, LCSW, LISW a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Suzanne, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We love heartwarming stories – do you have a heartwarming story from your career to share?
In 2020, right as the pandemic began, the clinic location where I was working was being consolidated into the main location and while I was grateful not to be laid off, I decided that I did not want to make this transition. I took a massive leap of faith. I left my stable, salaried position with benefits and started my own private practice, Warm Milk and Honey Healing Psychotherapy Services. I was full within 8 weeks of opening, much to my relief. I chose the name of my practice with intention. The name partly comes from the title of Rupi Kaur’s gorgeous book of the most concise and poignant poetry you may even read, which is called Milk and Honey. And from, even in the turmoil of their youngest years, a sweet and maternal warm beverage that I used to make for my children at night before bed. We would call it “bumblebee milk’ and it consisted of warm milk with honey, cinnamon, and vanilla.
Now, I continue to run a successful psychotherapy practice. My office is beautiful. It is warm and safe and a space of healing. I am a trauma and grief specialist. I work with a lot of women who are navigating recovery from betrayal trauma, narcissistic abuse recovery, a wide array of relational and complex traumas, and other types of major life events. I operate from a holistic, client-centered space and I feel so very honored that my own experiences have been transmuted into a place where others find healing.
Suzanne, 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 am originally from Seattle but grew up in the East Valley of the Phoenix-metro area, where I currently live with my two sons (ages 8 and 14) and our three dogs, Ellie, Pumpkin, and Gus. After my bachelor’s degree at the University of Arizona, I worked for over a decade, domestically and abroad, for several federal agencies as a federal investigator. As I mentioned, I spent many years of my life as a military dependent and lived in England for 3.5 years. While there, and had the opportunity to study at the University of Cambridge, where I completed a program in grief and bereavement studies, in addition to several counselling (two “l’s” in the Queen’s English, naturally) skills courses, and a summer science program where I studied DNA, anaesthesiology, and psychopathology. I studied at Boston University School of Social Work from 2012 – 2015; my initial field placement was with a community mental health agency in Dayton, Ohio, working with the severely and persistently mentally ill population. My advanced field placement was in forensic psychiatry, where my team and I, in collaboration with the local court system, designed and launched a gender-specific trauma treatment program for female felony offenders who were also victims of human trafficking. Our clients all had extensive trauma histories and severe co-occurring substance abuse disorders. I moved into palliative / hospice care settings in both clinical and medical social work capacities next. I then spent a bit more time in a community mental health clinic working with voluntary and court-mandated adult clients with co-occurring disorders. In these settings, I have facilitated grief and bereavement groups, gender-specific relapse prevention groups, intensive outpatient groups, and gender-specific seeking safety groups.
Since 2019, I have owned a very feminine, holistic, beautiful private psychotherapy practice called Warm Milk and Honey Healing Psychotherapy Services. My specialties are trauma and grief. I see a lot of healthcare professionals, a lot of women who have suffered the death of a baby, folks who identify as Highly Sensitive Persons (HSP), many members of the LGBTQIA population, those who are recovering from spiritual and religious trauma, and I am also known in my area as a “therapist’s therapist.” I have a great deal of experience with narcissistic abuse recovery, betrayal trauma, and complex/relational trauma. I have training in perinatal mood disorders. I’m EMDRIA-certified in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and offer both traditional and intensive models of this treatment. I am also trained in Cognitive Processing Therapy, and am trained in a very neat modality called Deep Brain Reorienting (DBR), which is coming out of Scotland and offers a heavily somatic intervention for those with trauma histories. I’ve done a bit of work with the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland over the years. And about three years ago, I began training in electroencephalography (EEG), quantitative electroencephalography (qEEG, which is also known as brain-mapping) and neurofeedback. I am connected to the Biofeedback Certification International Alliance (BCIA), Northeast Region Biofeedback Society (NRBS) as well as the International Society for Neuroregulation and Research (ISNR), but I still feel very much a student of this modality. I am also level two-trained and attuned in the energy healing modality known as reiki. In 2021, I was invited by a prior professor to join the teaching team at Boston University School of Social Work and I now teach clinical skills to graduate students who are pursuing their master degrees in social work. I’m very much a life-long learner and I love being in that environment as a teacher.
While I don’t like to spend a lot of time thinking about what I am proud of, because I feel like my success is due massively to my position as a privileged white person, I am very proud of rebuilding my life after trauma. I survived. I am okay. My kids are okay. I am so proud and humbled to be able to use those experiences and the growth that has been a part of my own journey as the foundation for being able to help others navigate similar situations. I feel so humbled to be trusted by my patients and by my colleagues to provide exceptional, evidence-based, trauma-informed care to the members of my community.
Training and knowledge matter of course, but beyond that what do you think matters most in terms of succeeding in your field?
I do believe that therapists ought to commit to their continual growth and education over the course of their careers and that this perpetuatal state of being a student, a learner, an observer of our own internal and relational experiences is what helps us to evolve in this field. I also think that the success of my field is being able to connect authentically with the clients. Being a decent human being is step one, for sure. When I talk to my graduate students about imposter syndrome, I throw a statistic their way that I think can be both helpful and totally jarring. We think of the efficacy of therapy as having 70% to do with the relationship between the client and therapist, while the remaining 30% is attributable to the modality of therapy that is employed. From this we can deduce that yes, yes, we do need to learn our modalities and practice them appropriately, but building relationships with our clients is a massive part of the success of therapy. It also causes students to think to themselves, “oh, no! What if they don’t like me?” And my response to that is that no therapist is everyone’s cup of tea. This is fine! But we do need to do our own work so that we can be poised and ready to help those who come behind us with their work. We need to know our limitations. We need to know when to refer out. We need to know our boundaries. We need to practice intentional self-care. We need to ensure that we remain connected to other clinicians, as peers and/or as supervisors so that we can continue to explore and manage our own very human responses to the very important work that we are doing on this earth.
If you could go back, would you choose the same profession, specialty, etc.?
I think this profession came into my life at precisely the most perfect time. As I mentioned, I had spent many years in a profession with the federal government. While perhaps viewed as glamourous or something, it was really just a lot of paperwork and a lot of struggling mightily as a feminine female in a flamingly patriarchal career field. But I met literally thousands of people in that field. I was very, very shy growing up and this role helped to push me out of my shell. Out of my comfort zone. I had to fake it until I made it. There were parts of it that I really enjoyed and parts that I absolutely could not stand. But I learned a lot about people’s lives. About interactions. And all of this would serve me incredibly well when it was time to shift into clinical social work. I feel like I was made to be a psychotherapist. I love it. I love my office space. I’ve made it a beautiful, safe, warm, and welcoming place to do The Work. I am surrounded by kind, supportive colleagues. I absolutely adore the clients. They are so brave and so resilient. They work so hard on the most difficult experiences. They trust me to help them and this is so humbling and such an honor. We learn how to dance gracefully together in a way that helps them heal. And then they graduate from therapy. Off they go, to live their lives. I have the best job. I would choose it again a thousand times over.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.warmmilkandhoneyhealing.com
- Facebook: Warm Milk and Honey Healing Psychotherapy Services LLC
Image Credits
Headshot – Kristen McKnight Photography