Today we’d like to introduce you to Julie Jones
Hi Julie, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
My husband, Steve Jones LCSW-S LCDC, and I co-own our small virtual private practice. We both have 19 years experience working in mental health and substance use, in settings from inpatient hospitals, residential treatment centers, partial and intensive outpatient, and now outpatient therapy. We both have family members with severe mental illness and have long been people our friends and families would turn to for emotional support. Before the inception of our company in 2021, Covid allowed us to see that virtual EMDR was just as effective as in person, and that providing therapy this way also helped to reduce some barriers to therapy including traveling, distance, and time constraints. It also allows us to serve clients anywhere in Texas and have a broader reach. We are both EMDR trained (I am certified) and Parts work trained (IFS/ego state). When I was trained in EMDR in 2017, it both completely changed the way I practice therapy and positively impacted me personally doing my own EMDR work. While I had been in talk therapy over the years and thought I had addressed my trauma, EMDR showed me that trauma was still living in my body, and allowed me a greater freedom that I had not known possible. We specialize on complex trauma, dissociation, substance use, neurodivergence, and depression/anxiety. I also work with Dissociate Identity Disorder. We are an anti-oppression practice meaning that we view mental health through a non-pathologizing lense that normalizes symptoms as a result of living in a toxic society. We are neurodivergent, BIPOC, LGBTQ+, disability, and fat affirming. Both of us are also neurodivergent and in long term recovery from substance use as well. Many of our clients come to us having been in therapy for years but not having received the relief or peace they are looking for. Our approach is a bottom up (rather than top down) that allows the brain and body to digest the trauma to live a fuller more expansive life.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Amazingly, we have been so blessed to have the majority of our years go very smoothly! Certainly there is a learning curve to becoming an entrepreneur, and this learning is never done. We adopt a perpetual student mindset in that there is always more to learn. This allows up to remain open and welcoming of our client’s experience and our own learning experiences. Some of the aspects of being anti-oppressive include unlearning the things we learned in grad school and job settings from “experts” that may not actually be true and learning the real experiences of people with lived experience. We know much of mental health and substance use research has largely been conducted on White men, which has excluded the experience of folks of non-male, BIPOC folks. In my initial session with clients, I let them know that I welcome and value feedback at all times. This allows me to align with them more closely and allows them to get the experience they want and deserve. Because we are committed to our own on going person growth, we are able to own the mistakes we make and grow in strength as a result of these experiences.
One challenge for us is marketing as introverts! Many entrepreneurers attend large meet and great gatherings where they can meet and market to as many people as possible at once or are continuously meeting with new people to grow their brand. We obviously do so much better meeting with folks one on one to create relationships. Being neurodivergent also means not always having the social battery or spoons to be able to do additional marketing/relationship generating which means waiting until the energy is present. There is a lot of compassion and space we give ourselves to not market in traditional or neurotypical ways. We are also grateful for the ability to create social media content as another form of this and to help provide psychoeducation to the public.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
Years of working in substance use treatment centers allowed both of us to examine our own relationship with substances. We each made the decision on our own that we had outgrown substances as a form of coping or enjoying life and chose to let them go. Being in long term recovery has allowed me to get to know myself in much deeper ways and recognize how even having a glass or two of wine was really masking much of who I was as a person. This discovery allowed me to realize that I am actually AUDHD. What I had been taught in school and shown in the media about Autism was not representative of my experience because of the masking. An example of this is the stereotype that all Autistics do not make eye contact. I make a great deal of eye contact which I have since learned is a subtle sign of Autism as well. This has allowed me to take a deeper dive into neurodivergence and now I absolutely love working with clients who are ND and trying to figure out their flavor of ND/brain type and how to live their best life. Unmasking for me has been asking myself the question, “Who would I be had the world not already told me who I SHOULD be”. Folks assigned female at birth have been socialized from such a young age to smile, make others comfortable, and make ourselves small. Unlearning this is interesting and courageous. I am passionate about changing the picture of what Autism looks like to help more people recognize this in themselves. While I do not like the labeling aspect of diagnoses and believe the DSM 5 has very pathologizing language and completely leaves out the social context of White Supremacy Culture as the root of dis-ease, finding a name to what we feel can be very relieving and help make sense of a lifetime of experiences that is different than neurotypical experiences.
How do you think about luck?
Steve and I have had the privilege of working in many highly respected jobs including (me) The Menninger Clinic, and Driftwood Recovery, (both) Memorial Herman Prevention and Recovery Center, and Legacy hospital System in Portland Oregon. These have afforded us unique and invaluable learning opportunities.
We are deeply spiritual people. We both grew up in religion (Catholicism for me and Episcopalian for Steve) and have evolved from this to finding more connection to the universe in nature, in people, animals, and experiences now. Starting our business was the biggest trust fall of our lives, in that it was actually terrifying to suddenly be responsible for your own income and run a business for the first time ever. What we can say is that the last three years have surpassed our expectations in every way and we have very much been taken care of. We are so so grateful to the quality of life working from home allows us (no more commute and our coworkers are our two cats). Navigating office politics is not something we miss and not have to do that anymore has been so healthy for both of us.
Lastly, we must acknowledge our privilege as White people coming from middle class families with access to education and who are capable of working.
Pricing:
- 170.00 Private Pay
- Steve accepts in network insurance from Aetna, United, Optum and Oscar
- We can both bill Out Of Network insurance
- there are limited sliding scale spots for BIPOC.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://aligntherapyandemdr.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/KADuVVx6VzTsykfd/?mibextid=LQQJ4d
