Good to see you, too, thank you!

I think it was, yes, just about a month ago.

Awesome! Wow, yeah. That’s fabulous!

Wow, I’m so thrilled that I found you guys and that I’m able to be a part of our organization.

In my predoctoral internship for two years, I worked almost exclusively with adoptive and foster care youth and group home youth. So that is just very near and dear to my heart. I saw tremendous suffering and a lot of pain in the kids and families in those situations, and it was very rewarding to be able to offer them a safe space to process feelings and improve their mood and bring some happiness to them. I always remember that as my most impactful internship was working with foster care and group home youth.

Absolutely, I mean I’ve been looking for something like this for quite some time and I was just so lucky to stumble across you guys.

Oh, I think it would be so meaningful for yourself as a practitioner. I think it would be incredibly impactful for the people that you’re providing counseling for. I’m a firm believer in giving back to the community and doing pro bono and charitable work and volunteer work, and I do it in many arenas but like I said, this is an area that really touches my heart. I think you can really grow in your experience and your training if you haven’t worked in foster care before, to familiarize yourself with it. But if you are familiar with it, you know it’s desperately needed and really appreciated.

Oh my gosh, near where I was born, in Maine!

Yeah and the diversity, I think of all the different areas of the country, everybody has something a little different to offer. I have a different, neat short story if you have a second.

There was a girl that I was the primary therapist for in my internship when she was about seven to nine years old, she was in foster care with, I believe it was her aunt who took her in. I recently came across them again in the weirdest way, in a crafting group! We couldn’t even remember where we remembered each other from – the aunt. Then we suddenly remembered it was like twenty years ago at my internship and the little girl that I provided therapy for is now a master mechanic for Toyota, which I’m just so proud of her!

I thought that was incredible, especially in such a male-dominated field. She’s like a master mechanic for Toyota - that’s so great. And she’s getting married, it’s like her whole life turned out wonderful and I couldn’t be more thrilled for her.

Yeah. And they remembered me which was also very nice!

Can you believe it!? Just amazing.

That we’re nationwide, that we’re so large, that we have so many volunteers, and that there’s so much support from the staff – trainings, CEs, Zoom meetings, and just so many pluses. It’s just like a big family, it seems like to me. Very welcoming, too.

I mean yeah, you guys reached out to me right away and it was just lovely. I just felt immediately welcomed into the family.

I think the fact that we provide services for free, because I know that that’s a community that struggles with finances and the fact that help is available readily to anyone who needs it without having to pay anything I think is just really a gift.

Absolutely. Exactly.

It absolutely does, yes.

You mean, over my lifetime?

I’ve published a book on recovering from severe trauma. It’s called Tales of Awakening on Amazon. I lost my fiancé twenty-two years ago to an overdose, and it was very hard recovering from his death. He was twenty-seven and I was thirty-three, so I wrote a book about that, about coming back to life after kind of emotionally flatlining. I’m really proud of that. I’m proud of the volunteer work I do to help various charities. I belong to the Thousand Oaks Women’s Club and the Soroptimist Club of Conejo Valley and we raise money for women and girls to get school scholarships, and we do things for seniors’ concerns, battered women and children, Meals on Wheels, and lots of things like that. And obviously I think we’ve discussed that I’m very active in animal rescue with several different shelters and rescues. So I do fundraising for them, I foster a special needs dog, I collect donations for them – I’ve been active in that for probably twenty years.

Animals mean a lot to me. And just some other things in the past that are just kind of interesting – I was a competitive martial artist on the open circuit for several years with a 95% one-placer show rate. So that was a passion of mine for a while. I also have an award-winning photograph that hung in city hall for six months, of my dog!

I also have two rescued snakes.

Of course! My pets are so comforting to me. I also have a senior who’s seventeen and a half. She’s the last of my pack of three – I lost two of my dogs during the pandemic a year and a half apart. One of them was my therapy dog and she used to come to work with me, and she was just great with the patients and the clients, especially children but even adults. So losing her was a real blow, but I like to do animal-assisted therapy and I’m hoping to be able to do that again in the future.

Yeah, I just got involved in crafting in the last year as an artistic outlet and I didn’t even know I could do that kind of stuff, but it turns out it’s very fun and very relaxing. So I’ve been enjoying that.

Absolutely, yes. Gardening, painting, things like that. I really enjoy that stuff too.

Of course!

I just appreciate that you guys accepted me so readily and I’m so looking forward to having my first patient and forming that bond and that relationship with them, and I would really strongly encourage anyone who’s considering volunteering to do so because it’s desperately needed and it’s really beneficial to all involved.

Thank you!

Aw, thank you. I appreciate hearing that.

Fantastic, looking forward to it. Thank you. Take care. Bye!