Tag Archives: therapy nashville

What is a Marriage and Family Therapist?

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Hi, my name is Christa Booker. I’m currently a Marriage and Family Therapy intern at The Happy Hour. You may recognize me from my previous work as a certified holistic life coach, a journey I began in 2020 at the onset of COVID-19. During my time working with individuals and groups at The Happy Hour, I noticed a significant pattern: relationships in my clients’ lives were shifting, influenced by the unique challenges of the pandemic. As I supported them through these changes, my curiosity deepened, and I developed a new passion for understanding the dynamics of human relationships. The relationships we form are essential to our overall well-being, and I became eager to explore this further. 

 

Now, I am pursuing a graduate degree in Marriage and Family Therapy at Lipscomb University. I am currently an intern where I work with individual clients, families and couples under supervision.

 

The title “Marriage and Family Therapist” can be a bit misleading. Like all counseling professionals, I address a range of individual and relational issues. The distinctive training of an MFT focuses on understanding relational systems. We examine patterns of interaction and cycles within families, always considering the broader context of a person’s life. My approach is holistic, viewing problems in the context of the entire relational system, not just the individual. Whether working with an individual, couple, or family, I take into account the complex influences of interaction, beliefs, culture, upbringing, and relationships to better understand and address the challenges my clients face. 

 

So the basics of what an MFT is summed up best from the AAMFT website: We will focus on understanding your symptoms within interactions and relationships. The existing environment and context is given careful examination paying particular attention to the family system – as defined by you.  MFTs treat predominantly individuals but always from the perspective that “relationships matter.”

 

Work with Christa at a Reduced Rate!

Enjoy a reduced intern rate on one-on-one or duo therapy with Christa while she completes her master’s degree in Marriage and Family Counseling. If you’ve worked with Christa previously, you’ll know that this is a steal!

Supervision will be provided indirectly by one of our licensed therapists while Christa is practicing at The Happy Hour.

 

Book now

What is DBT?

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Dialectical Behavior Therapy, or DBT, is a type of psychotherapy adapted from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. DBT is a skills-based therapy that focuses on mindfulness, emotion regulation, interpersonal effectiveness, and distress tolerance. Through practice of DBT, we learn to accept the things we do not have control over and focus our energy on the things we do. 

 

The major players in the DBT world are Marsha Linehan, the original developer of DBT, and Lane Pederson, a psychologist who developed the first organization to certify DBT providers and accredit DBT programs. Dr. Linehan developed DBT after struggling with her own mental health issues. Dr. Linehan found that to build a life worth living, we have to practice both acceptance and changing our behaviors. 

 

Who can benefit from DBT?

 

DBT was first developed for the treatment of chronic suicidality in adults. We now have research supporting the use of DBT in adults with personality disorders, eating disorders, treatment-resistant depression, substance use, and a variety of other disorders. DBT is also evidence-based for the treatment of adolescents with various mental health disorders. 

 

If you are wondering, is DBT right for me? It is important to know that a formal diagnosis is not required for DBT skills to be helpful. If you are struggling with self-sabotage, unhealthy relationship patterns, struggling to cope with big emotions, poor impulse control, or engaging in risky behavior, or if you just feel like you’re getting in your own way, DBT might be just what you need.

 

When is it helpful?

 

The answer to that, from a DBT therapist, is always! 

 

DBT skills are often looked at as life skills. They are skills to help regulate strong emotions, build the ability to tolerate distress, engage in healthy and adaptive relationships, and build mindfulness skills for everyday practice. DBT can be most helpful when someone is struggling with managing and regulating emotions. 

 

Where is DBT offered in Nashville?

 

DBT can be offered along with other therapeutic approaches in psychotherapy sessions led by clinicians with the appropriate training and credentials. DBT is offered at The Happy Hour! DBT is most commonly offered in individual therapy and group therapy settings.  The skills are usually taught in session with a therapist and then practiced in your everyday life. Some DBT programs utilize Diary Cards to track the use of skills and severity of symptoms. 

 

For many, when starting out with DBT skills, it can feel difficult and frustrating when the skills don’t immediately click. I like to think of it as using a new muscle, at first it is difficult and hurts, but after time, it becomes easier and takes less energy to use that muscle. With DBT skills, we have to practice the skills for them to become effective and easy to use.

 

How does DBT work?

 

The original research on DBT supported a structured DBT approach to treatment, also known as standard DBT. Standard DBT was originally offered as a combination of individual therapy, skills group training, and client coaching. 

 

Through additional research and real-world practice, it was found that DBT is still effective in a more integrative approach. This means that you can see a therapist who practices a variety of modalities in combination with DBT in order to find the strategies and tools that both challenge and work for you. 

 

THE CONTENT OF THIS BLOG IS FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY. IT IS NOT A SUBSTITUTE FOR A THERAPEUTIC RELATIONSHIP.

 

Curious to see how DBT could help you move out of your own way, so you can live the life you know is meant for you?

Check out our upcoming DBT group, led by therapist, Amy Narusas.

Life Coaching Was The Lifeline I Didn’t Know I Needed

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I’ve always been a strong believer in asking for help when life gets overwhelming. I’d sought out therapy when life threw me curveballs in the past, and it had really helped me process grief and the residual fear from a traumatic experience. But what happens when life isn’t overwhelming? What do you do when life is decidedly underwhelming?

 

A friend introduced me to The Happy Hour, and after speaking to them, they confirmed my suspicion that I wasn’t in need of therapy, but instead encouraged me to give life coaching a try. As a high achieving, driven, and organized person, I’d never thought life coaching could make a big difference to my life. Turns out I was wrong because life coaching was the lifeline I didn’t know I needed.

 

After grad school things didn’t turn out quite as planned… which seems to be par for the course for many millennials. I found myself overworked, uninspired and burnt out. So instead of diving back into the corporate world, I decided to do some freelance work while I figured out what was next for me. Freelance turned into starting my own business, and working reasonable hours with clients I felt passionate about. This shift left me more fulfilled in some ways but wasn’t without its tradeoffs. The corporate world can provide financial security, community, and a clear career trajectory. Entrepreneurship can lack all of those.

 

All that said, I was doing okay, my life just didn’t look how I’d planned. In many ways I felt like a failure, even though rationally I knew that wasn’t true. While I couldn’t put my finger on any one thing that was majorly wrong, nothing felt majorly right either. If you were to ask me how things were going, the most honest answer would have been “meh”.

 

3 ways life coaching was a game changer:

 

CLARITY

After my first session with my coach, I was in tears. WTF? That was not how I saw that going. She didn’t just listen to me, she heard me. This became apparent when she nudged me out of my comfort zone by challenging some of the stories I was telling her… and myself. I realized some of the things I was fixating on actually weren’t that big a deal, but that there were underlying limiting beliefs and self-sabotaging behaviors that I wasn’t consciously aware of. 

 

ACTION PLAN

After we spent some time diving into those limiting behaviors – why they were there, how much they were rooted in reality, and what we could do to move past them – she helped me map out an action plan. As a goal-oriented person this was right up my alley. She made sure my goals were incremental, attainable, and would serve me in the long run, rather than just being a temporary band-aid. 

 

We also allowed for flexibility in this plan. Sometimes the journey isn’t linear, no matter how much I want it to be. She coached me through learning to bend and pivot. I learned to accept that maybe the initial destination I defined was actually just a lesson on the way to something much bigger and much more aligned with who I am.

  

ACCOUNTABILITY

I’ve come to terms with the fact that if I don’t pre-book a gym class, or workout with a personal trainer, I’m much more likely to hit snooze when my alarm goes off at 5am than I am to get up and work out alone. I need that accountability. For some reason needing that same accountability when working on my life in general, my happiness, my fulfillment made me feel like a failure. (Remember those limiting beliefs I mentioned before? This was one of them.) 

 

I now know the only way I can fail myself is to be too proud to ask for someone to hold me accountable for taking action. It keeps me on track to my goals, and in the grand scheme of things, serves as a reminder to put myself first. When I put myself first, I’m a better business owner, and a better friend.

 

Did life coaching solve all my problems? Nope. It was never supposed to. What it did do was give me perspective, helped me define a new direction, and provided me with the skills I needed to take things in my stride without being so hard on myself.

It also made me realize some of the things I thought were problems, weren’t problems at all. Coaching helped me to establish clear boundaries (in life and work), and to rebuild the confidence that I’d lost- which has made me happier and more fun to be around. As a whole, I now feel like I’m in a place of flow. And when I next feel stuck, I know my life coach will be there to help me navigate my way back to peace again.

 

This guest blog was written by one of The Happy Hour’s coaching clients who has requested to remain anonymous.


Curious about what life coaching could do for you?

Give the studio a call at 615-953-3934 to learn more, or read about our certified life coaches here.

Ready to transform your life?

BOOK LIFE COACHING

Turning Fear into Curiosity: My Journey to Spirituality

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Open. That was the word I chose on January 1st — the word that would define my intention for the year. At the time, I was laser focused on opening a brick and mortar location for the Happy Hour. It’s now February 13th, and boy oh boy, that word has taken on a whole new meaning to me.

Flashback to the first week in January. I had just begun training to become a Certified Holistic Life Coach. I’d been doing online classes for a while, but couldn’t get my act together to actually finish the requirements, so I decided to commit to the in-person training and just get it done. Being both a new business owner and a parent of two kids under three years old, productivity and efficiency were always at the forefront of my mind.

Ever since I did a 180 from my corporate job and started my health journey, I have considered myself a pretty intense person when it comes to anything self-care, mental health, and self-awareness related. I do the work; I regularly see a therapist, practice yoga, and read all the inspiring Instagram posts. I try all the new wellness stuff out there – and preach about it! I turned my life’s work into creating a company that promotes the kind of self-care and community that normalizes mental wellness, in the hopes of making the world a happier place. I think of myself as a happy person, because I am! But, I recently came face to face with issues that have been lurking beneath the surface, and holding me back in so many areas of my life. I’ve spent a lot of time uncovering and working through them over the years, but it wasn’t until Day 3 of Life Coach training that I had finally said “uncle,” and surrendered to my truth. We spent hours each day of training getting coached in a group and doing a lot of deep introspection. The idea being, that you can’t be an effective life coach if you aren’t aware of what’s going on inside of you… you can’t give what you don’t have.

Well, Day 3 is the day that something inside of me snapped. I can’t tell you what the final trigger was, but it doesn’t matter. All that matters is that it happened. My typically buttoned-up, polished, MBA-trained self, broke down and confessed to the group that I was sick of it. I was sick of always being buttoned up. I was sick of being polished. I was sick of feeling closed off. I was sick of the pressure I put on myself to be perfect. SICK.OF.IT. The trainer took a breath, and masterfully responded with a quote that author Elizabeth Gilbert tweeted several years back:

I’ve never seen any life transformation that didn’t begin with the person in question finally getting tired of their own bullshit.

Wow. I just got called out. And she hit the nail on the head. I promptly opened my journal to a fresh page, and titled it: “My Bullshit To Get Over ” and wrote a bulleted list of what I consider to be, well, my own bullshit. I noticed that there was a clear theme on my list – fear. Fear was driving so many of my decisions, and how I showed up in everyday life. What am I so afraid of? Why have I been letting fear take the wheel for so long? In that moment, I became determined to address this bullshit list head-on.

Breakthrough number two came on Day 4 of training, when the same trainer posed the question, “What spiritual rituals do you practice every day?” Cue the bead of sweat down my forehead. This question both sent me into a tailspin, and subsequently changed my life. As we went around the circle, it seemed that everyone had a number of beautifully articulated spiritual rituals that they practiced on a daily basis. As my peers spoke about these rituals, the peace and elation that accompanied their words were palpable. It was clear to see that they were vibrating on some other level that I didn’t know about. A club of which I wasn’t a part because I, on the other hand, didn’t even know what spiritual practice was. To be honest, I didn’t really know what the word ‘spiritual’ meant. Does this mean how pious you are? How often you pray to your higher power? How frequently you meditate? I believe in God, I pray as often as I think about it, I go to church sometimes… Where does that put me on this spiritual scale? To put it lightly, I was confused.

To answer her question, all I could muster up was, “ummmm, pass?”. The confusion and panic in my face became apparent to the group, so we took a step back to talk about the definition of spirituality. There is no one-size-fits all definition here, but the one that stuck to me was the one that defined spirituality as “anything that brings you closer to gratitude.” All of a sudden it didn’t feel like such a daunting task. Maybe I could do this after all.

You’d think that after years of trying any sort of self-development work I could get my hands on that I would’ve figured out a spiritual routine that brought me to my higher self, if you will. But I didn’t. That always bothered me, but I couldn’t figure out why. I put in the work, why am I not feeling the peace and spiritual connection I’m looking for?

What I’ve come to realize is that on the other side of this desire to become the best and happiest version of myself has been sitting a tremendous amount of fear, and when you let fear act as the guiding force in your decisions and actions, you are never going to be present enough to find that higher self that radiates positive energy (which is how I envision spirituality). Feeling simply content and confident that you are doing exactly what you are supposed to be doing. In my endeavor to become the best leader I could be, to become the most successful business person I could be, and the best parent I could be, I lost two things: my sense of self and my creativity. My spirituality, this ‘higher self,’ would never appear without those things. That’s not good enough for me anymore. Maybe what I find will look different than what I’ve envisioned, but I’m sure as hell not going to stand in the way of realizing my own spirituality, whatever that may look like, anymore.

What’s this about creativity though? Somewhere along the way in the past decade, after writing hundreds of pages of business case studies, memos, pitches, and the like, I lost my creativity. Or maybe just buried it deep beneath piles of excel spreadsheets and business lingo. I was so focused on producing and hitting deadlines that I didn’t allow time for anything creative. Sadly, I came to believe that I wasn’t creative, and told people all the time, “I’m just not a creative person.”

That’s where this blog comes into play. I’m combining the two things that have felt like a hole in my recent life: spirituality and creativity. This blog is an attempt to uncover the creativity that I buried a while back, while also saying goodbye to fear.  I’m jumping all in to new ways to heal what needs to be healed, and digging deeper into myself to reach that higher vibration I talked about.

Over the next few weeks I’ll bring you along with me as I try new things in hopes to shed some light on something you may have been curious about, but haven’t yet pushed ‘go’ on. I will be your guinea pig, so to speak.

As I’ve become more present through this spiritual journey, I’ve noticed how much my daughter reminds me of myself as a kid, spending hours reading books, getting so much joy from it, and using her imagination to make up fun stories. It pained me to ask myself why I ever stopped doing that. Why did I lose that child-like excitement about creativity? Reading and writing brought me so much joy. I’m giving it a whirl again, and my writing muscle is a good bit weaker than it once was, but I’m having a lot of fun giving it some attention.

I’m a month into this journey, and I feel like I don’t know who I am anymore, but also like I’m my true self for the first time in my life. I am beginning to remove those blocks. And the payoff has been incredible. By the way, that “List of My Own Bullshit” I mentioned earlier has kicked off my daily journaling practice as each day I write about how I’m going to get over my own BS that day, along with any other feelings that come up. And just like that, I’ve got my first daily spiritual ritual.