10 Years of Trauma Specialists - a Live Episode

welcome to Mental Health Evolution, a podcast about what's changing in mental health and why it matters. I'm your host, Rachel Harrison, inviting you into honest conversations with people from all perspectives in the field. Clinicians, tech founders, investors, insurance companies, and all the folks in between. Let's explore what's working, what's not not, and what's next. Welcome back everyone to the Mental Health Evolution Podcast where we talk about the mental health industry and the changing landscape. Today is a very different day for our podcast because I am not going to be hosting. Instead, I am going to introduce two of my friends who are going to be hosting this podcast and I am going to be interviewed. But before I do that, I would like to introduce Tom lynch and Karlys Kline. So first Tom for more than 45 years, Tom has had the honor of serving others as a lawyer in the beautiful state of Maryland, initially in Baltimore and thereafter in Frederick with his firm Miles and Stockbridge, integrating a new office into the Miles family. When taking the oath as a lawyer, Tom committed himself always to strive for excellence while observing the highest standards of professionalism with colleagues, clients and the courts and opposing counsels and their clients. As of May 1, 2021, Tom retired and has worked part time primarily as a mediator for the courts since then. This has given Tom time to provide greater service to this community, one of Tom's highest priorities. Since coming to Frederick, Tom has served as chair of the Board of the Community Foundation, Frederick Community College and of the Chamber of Commerce. He has also served on the board of the ymca. Most recently, Tom had the honor of chairing the Charter Review Committee for the City of Frederick. Tom has two daughters, Rebecca and Sarah, who are out and about in the world accomplishing remarkable things in their respective professions. But his most important attribute is being the support system for his wife, Karlys Kline, and her daily task of doing good and spreading joy in this great city. Welcome Tom.

Absolutely true.

I'm the support system and Karlys Kline is a leader known for her community service and philanthropic activities. Without knowing anyone in Frederick, Carlis moved here in 1990. Her earlier career had been successful in New York and Philadelphia with the Jones New York Company. In Frederick, she switched careers completely by working her way up from Gal Friday to Vice President with a very large building manufacturing company. By 2009, she retired and dedicated her time to improving the lives of women in Frederick County. This was accomplished mainly by creating the Women's Giving Circle. Carlos has participated on the board or committees of over 42 local nonprofits and businesses. Her passion is to connect the dots with no agenda or reward, desiring only to make the community a better place. A few of her boards include the Women's Giving Circle, Frederick Health, Homewood, Rotary, Frederick Arts Council, FCC Foundation, Mental Health Association, Downtown Frederick Partnership, United Way, Habitat for Humanity. Tom encourages her to spread joy and do good. And they vacation in Frederick because they love their lives in this community. Carlis is grateful every day for the opportunity to give back wherever she's needed. Thank you, Carlis.

Thank you.

And now I am turning it over to both of you to be the hosts of the podcast today.

Okay, well, I'm going to start. And I can't tell you how tickled I am to be here with you. What an honor. And I am probably one of your biggest fans since I've met you years ago. And I want to talk a little bit about how I met you. Someone recommended that I meet this therapist named Rachel Harrison. And in my mind, you were a sole practitioner. I don't research anybody that I meet with. And so as we're sitting there, I said, well, where's your office? And you said at the time, it was five locations. And she said, I have five locations. And I said, I wow, like, how do you run between all those locations? I had no idea that you had this thriving, gigantic practice. And then you proceeded to explain EMDR to me, which I thought was such an amazing concept. And ever since then, I've just followed you and applauded you and I'm grateful to know you.

So I guess, Tom, I'll say a few words about. Well, first, greetings all, for all of you that are here. Thank you for sharing this time with us. And thank you so much, Rachel, for your kind introduction. And to be frank about it, Carlos and I are so thrilled to be here for your 10th anniversary celebration to be included in this. So we really appreciate your including us and we're humbled by the opportunity. For those of you that know me that are here or that watch this podcast, at some point you're probably scratching your heads and saying, what's a reasonably well adjusted, apparently senior doing in a place like this? Especially when it's not my profession. There's nothing to do with my profession in my professional life. Well, the answer's pretty straightforward. About a little over two years ago, over a breakfast on a Sunday morning, which we typically share, Carlos and I, we came to the consensus view that I was damaged goods. And so I am here as A patient who came to a EMDR after more than 50 years from the date of the trauma events I experienced as a child and up through my adolescent and teen years. So I approached. Well, we had that conversation. Carlos, by happenstance, had just met Rachel and said, I just heard about this. You might want to think about it. No pressure, but I thought about it for a couple of days and ended up calling and getting an appointment to get into EMDR therapy, which I did. And to be frank about it, given that I am a lawyer, I approached it with skepticism, complete skepticism, as you would expect a lawyer in anything we do. But after eight sessions, I emerged from EMDR not only a true believer, but, frankly, it was transformative for me as a person. It was transformative for me as a person. It was also transformative for me and my relationship to my two daughters, who are, as you heard, grown and out and about the world. But equally important, it was transformative in my relationship with my four siblings from whom I had been disconnected for 35 years, truly disconnected for 35 years, because we had shared trauma which blew up our family and were completely disconnected for a very long time, never having convened the five of us. So it introduced me to the capacity to bring the group together, which we did that spring after I completed the EMDR and actually just had our second annual meeting of the lynch clan up in Massachusetts. And the restoring of the relationships with my siblings is something that I can now, frankly go to my grave in peace. I've accomplished something that but for emdr, I would never have accomplished in life. And so that's why I'm here. I'm the patient.

I love that perspective. Tom?

Well, so trauma therapy is a word that I think many people have heard, but I don't know that the general public knows of emdr. So let's go back to where, when you started, how did you decide on concentrating on emdr? And then, secondly, I think you should share when you made your decision to go from solo practitioner to expanding.

Yeah, so I was a therapist for about 10 years before I was trained in EMDR. And then once I got trained, that really started to change and transform what was happening in therapy with my clients. So much so that I started saying, I really love this stuff, and eventually became a consultant and then a trainer, training other therapists to do that. And I became very passionate about it. You know me, I'm pretty passionate. If I really like something, I'm going to be all in on something. And so I started saying, I really think all therapists need to know how to do this because we can only take people so far. Um, you heard me say earlier today, being trauma informed is amazing in the therapy room, but that doesn't actually treat the trauma. And that is what we do in emdr. It's an evidence based approach and we're able to actually treat trauma, literally changing how the brain experiences the trauma going forward, which allows people that freedom, allows them not to have triggers, all of those things. And so I had also become a trainer in emdr. And sitting down to think about creating this practice, I said, I really want it to be called trauma specialist. But at the time there really were no practices named that I thought this is such a risk because people are going to potentially be turned off by that. You know, I don't have trauma or what does this actually mean? But I really wanted it to represent who we are, which the vision was to have a group of therapists that we do have that are excellent at actually treating trauma and setting people free and hopefully influencing their communities from there for good.

Well, congratulations also on the 10 years. And I look at some of the statistics, you've had 10,000 clients, which is amazing. So the seven locations, the 10 years, how did you get the word out? How did you let people know what EMDR is? Because it's complicated.

Weren't you afraid of the risk of taking on the name trauma specialist?

Oh, yeah. Just curious because like 100% I thought this could crash and burn. But to someone today said, like, as entrepreneurs, right, we take big risks. It was like, well, this is either going to go really well or really bad. I have no idea. I have no idea. But spreading the word, I don't really know. I just think I talked about it all the time because I love it. So I don't know. And then as, as I trained more people and they have experiences and Tom, like your experience. People who experience EMDR tend to talk to other people and tend to have that positive. And I think really word of mouth is what grew the practice more than anything else.

Did you encounter any resistance in formulating this new approach? And just curious, because anytime you launch out on a new branch that maybe no one's been out on before, you definitely.

I think some people are still hesitant to approach us because of our name maybe and saying, I don't really have trauma, I just want treatment for depression or whatever, I think the other form of resistance, honestly, has been from the clinical side and other clinicians or practice owners who are taking a different approach. And there's some disputes in our world about which approach is better kind of thing. So that's where I've had the most difficulty.

Well, I came to. To emdr, as we just discussed, accidentally, kind of because of a conversation we were having on. On, you know, a Sunday morning. And Carla's brought the subject up of, you know, she was concerned about the fact that I was always sleep deprived and I had restless leg syndrome. And she explained to me, which I didn't realize, startle reflex, which was chronic, that affected her sleep, obviously, and then affected my sleep. And we had the conversation. It got very deep because I said, you know, I'm frustrated as a human being, in regret that there are so many things that I think I could have accomplished, despite my success, that I didn't accomplish. She said, why do you think that is? I think it's because. And I said, I think it's because of the trauma that I encountered as a juvenile, especially in my teen years. And so she then introduced me to the fact that there was this concept, and I went to it. But as I said, I came with total skepticism because, you know, it's 50 years in the rearview mirror. Do I really want to revisit all this stuff now at this stage of my life? So I would be interested in knowing because, you know, I went through the eight steps that you went through an eight session. And as I say, it was transformative for me. But if you have somebody like me that comes challenged but is skeptical, how do you get beyond the skepticism? And is there a point at which being skeptical and a non believer, in addition to having the psychological resistance to want to reopen the can of worms that is back there, how do you get a patient like that to move beyond that and actually accomplish something through the therapy?

There's, I think, a lot of layers to that, but at the end of the day, I think people that are skeptical are my favorites.

I'm proud of myself.

All right.

No, because a lawyer does a good thing.

That's great, right? Because EMDR is really designed as a modality to follow the client's brain. And so we're not trying to force anything. We're trying to facilitate you experiencing your own healing journey and listening to your own brain and what it needs. And so there's an opportunity there for you to be able to try it out. But if anyone doesn't want to try it out, I don't think it's our job to overcome that.

Well, do you have patients that come to you that want relief, but they can't get beyond the Fact of not wanting to reopen the can.

Yes. I mean, that's scary for all of us, right? And we. We have different things that we do therapeutically that can really help with that. But I often say what takes the longest amount of time is getting a client ready for emdr. Once we start emdr, the process is generally pretty quick.

I can say as an observer of him going through it, the trauma that happened to him as a young man, he never spoke about it. Just it was one comment one time, and he said, I don't want to talk about it. And after he had gone through eight sessions of emdr, which I never interfered and asked how's it going? I just let him go through it. We were at dinner with Andrea Chapel Delaine, who was the president of Hood, and her husband. All of a sudden, Tom said, do you know what EMDR is? And they were like, no. And I'm thinking, okay, where is he going with this? And he told the whole story. And it was the first time I had ever heard the story. And he was so calm, so okay with it. And from that point on, he could talk to anybody about the trauma that happened to him as a child and is like a bigger fan of yours than I am because he spreads the word everywhere. But I don't want to run out of time without talking to you about one other thing.

Okay.

You partner with so many different organizations in Frederick and have changed so many lives that way. What prompted you to decide to start partnering with other organizations? Because that's pretty unique.

It is. And I think it's really just. Honestly, it's been opportunities, so it's been meeting people in the community and starting to talk about what we offer as a practice and finding out what their needs are and then eventually figuring out that there's a pairing there. I think being more and more involved in this community, I was part of leadership. Frederick county made a lot of great contacts, one in our audience here. And that's where a lot of these conversations have just sort of organically come up. And that's kind of what's led to that. I think it's just a step by step process.

So do you envision that growing as time goes on? And do you have any changes that you'd like to see in the future?

Well, that's the question I was going to ask. I was going to ask you the question. Here you are, you have your crystal ball in front of us, in front of you. Take us out 10 years and tell us your vision of how you would see the opportunities that this therapy provides, being maximized in this community. Because I'm sure you have a vision, looking about where you want to see this ten years from now.

Yes. So I would love to have more community partnerships. Kind of our next vision that we've worked on with our leadership team is to have sort of four pillars of what we do as a practice. So one pillar that we're already pretty solid with is the idea. It's all based on relationship. And for me, some of that comes from a very tech world and AI therapists and all kinds of things that are available out there. And so what is it that sets us apart, what makes us different? And it is that relationship based work. So if you think about relationship to yourself is a lot of what EMDR and typical therapy works on. So we've got that pillar down pretty well. Relationship to your significant others, your immediate family, kids, partner is the other pillar that we have therapists already that work on that and we're doing that. The other thing I find important is relationship to the earth, to nature. I think there's a lot to that that we miss as a culture and that is something that our staff is starting to be trained in and we have some plans for how we're evolving and developing that. And the last one is relationship to community. And that is us wherever our location is in Delaware, Pennsylvania or Maryland, being able to really interact with the community and figure out how we support community initiatives. We work with the Coalition for a Healthier Frederick county here. There's just a lot of people doing a lot of work on that and we want to be a part of that however it makes sense.

Well, I'm example of someone who is senior and then my success story. Is there an age like for instance, can you work with the Frederick County Public Schools for children?

Absolutely.

I mean looking at Covid and frankly some of the depression that exists because of what's happening in the country, I'm sure there's a lot of grief out there that is there an age specific readiness that has to be there for somebody to get the therapy or is it not really?

We do work with Littles too. It's work with Littles and their parents, of course, not just like a solo sess. I would say probably about age 3 to 103.

Wow. And what for you and I recognize every patient might be different, but can you describe what success looks like for you as working through it with a patient and instances where what lack of success looks like? Sure, because I'm sure that happens with Patients.

Yeah. I mean, and I think ultimately therapy is a partnership. Right? You have to have the right match. It's a very personal journey. And so developing that relationship. But then success is really defined by what a client is motivated to do. And so we as therapists really work toward that end more than sort of our own goals, while also presenting opportunities and things that we see along the way. So I think success is seeing someone get where they wanted to go or even further than they wanted to go. And if that doesn't happen, I think we have to look at what's standing in the way. What are some of the barriers? Are those something that we can solve for, or is there something different that's better for that person?

Well, how can we help make. Because it seems to me that trauma treatment, because of the extent of trauma that people never talk about, that exists in our community, exists everywhere. How can we spread the word and get people who should be aware of this, aware of what you're providing? Because I can tell you I'm a much different person as a 73 year old than I was as a 71 year old. And the transformative nature for what it's done for me and for my family in the fullest sense is something that I'd love to share. And I'm sharing right here, obviously.

Well, sharing on this podcast is awesome. I think people don't really understand, even people who are in mental health don't always understand that we have an evidence based treatment that cures ptsd, period.

I believe that it cured him.

Yeah. So why not try it?

I've just told people that are here that when I was a young lawyer, because of the trauma events, I got to a point where I created a cocoon around myself. And so I blocked my memories first of what had occurred. And I didn't actually remember what had occurred until I was in my late 40s, which is the first time I re encountered the trauma that I had experienced. But I also blocked myself from my own emotions. And the result of that is that as a young lawyer, my nickname in this large institutional law firm was the monster. Because I was a workaholic and lacking in empathy, both for witnesses and for staff. People were scared to death of working with me, which people that now work with me have no idea that the same person is sitting in front of them. So it's one of those things that I think not even appreciating as a 21, 22 year old, what trauma has done to you is something that if I had had this therapy Back then my life would have been so different than it's been because you're, you know, you got fear of failure. You got all these things that are wrapped up in the trauma that you experienced.

And a lot of times I think men more than women want to like suck it up and not and say that was in the past and don't want to deal with it, even though they don't realize that it's impacting every day.

Every day, every single day.

Did you, did you have any final words that you want to wrap it up with?

I just want to say that every person that has a story like you, Tom, is why Trauma Specialists exists. So I'm excited to see what the future brings. I'm excited for the work we've already been able to do in the team we have. So just thank you for the opportunity to talk about it.

Well, congratulations on your 10 years and we are excited for you and I'm excited for this community because once this spreads, it only can benefit the community

well, and it has spread seven locations, so yay. Rachel.

Thank you, thank you.

And thank you for having us. Really.

Thanks for being here. And for those of you listening, thanks for being here and listening to the Mental Health Evolution podcast. We will be back next week where I will actually be the host and be interviewing someone else. Bye for now.