Today we’d like to introduce you to Matt Estey.
Hi Matt, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I was attending University of Texas Law School in 2002, sitting in a Corporate Law class with a teacher I really enjoyed when I realized that I just didn’t want to be a lawyer. I went home and did an internet search and this was before google so you had to be a data scientist to find anything. That internet search changed the course of my life irrevocably. Three months later, I was flying to Georgia and started working as a counselor with adjudicated youth and foster kids at a therapeutic wilderness program called Eckerd Youth Alternatives. I spent 3.5 years in the Blue Ridge Mountains and I definitely got way more than I bargained for. Since 2003, I’ve worked at three different organizations and worked my way up from being direct care staff to a manager or director in those organizations. It has been a wonderful learning experience.
In 2017, I launched Menninger 360 in Houston. This program is a PACT (Program of Assertive Community Treatment) model which has been around for decades but there are only a handful of private programs like it in the world. Essentially, we created an interdisciplinary team including psychiatrists, nurses, master’s level clinicians, and peer recovery specialists who work 1:1 with people anywhere in the community. We provide team-based support for people in the context of their life. When we started, I had 15 years of experience working at pretty much every level of behavioral healthcare there is, and I’ve never experienced anything quite like a PACT team. It has been a total game changer for me.
After operating this program for years at Menninger, I asked my husband if he was willing to take a leap with me and start a PACT team in Austin to work with adolescents and adults. He said yes, we jumped, and The Mind-Body Collaborative was born.
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?
I talk to clients all the time about how I did not have a clear idea of where I was going in my life until my mid-30’s. I related to the Tolkien quote, ‘Not all those that wander are lost’ and I had an intuition that if I continued to follow my purpose and passion of working with people in the process of changing their lives, everything would unfold as it needed to. This proved to be quite true. Along the way, I’ve had buckets of urine thrown at me (wilderness), a tooth knocked out (wilderness), helped quell a riot (wilderness), and worked with hundreds of clients and their families navigate some of the most challenging life situations imaginable. I realized back in 2003 that by engaging in this work, my life would be transformed, and I’ve never lost that thread.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I am a licensed clinical social worker and the CEO of The Mind-Body Collaborative (TMBC) in Austin. Formally, I engage with clients in individual therapy, couples therapy, group work, and family work. I conceptualize my role on our team as the person tasked with containing the collective anxiety of our staff. We work with people in the world which means we do not control the environment our clients live in and that can be quite anxiety-provoking for clients, their families, and our staff.
TMBC goes well beyond traditional outpatient therapy though because there are a subset of individuals and families that need more robust, integrated support. The biggest obstacle to high-quality mental healthcare is so pervasive, it’s invisible: you have to get to treatment to get treatment. Our program dismantles this obstacle and many others.
Philosophically, we are a community integration model which is a fancy way of saying that any individual’s long term mental wellness has more to do with natural therapeutic supports (the stuff you don’t pay for like family, friends, fun stuff, hobbies, work/volunteering/school) than our work. Thus, our overarching goal is to collaborate with our clients to re-establish, develop, and maintain an array of natural therapeutic supports and make our services unnecessary.
Since our services are all 1:1, we are also able to actively support and engage families in ways no other type of program even attempts to do. It is not unusual for us to work with our adolescent or emerging adult families 3-5 hours per week as we get started and this is absolutely vital to the change process.
Professionally, I am most proud of our team. They inspire me, make me laugh everyday, and provide fantastic care to our clients and their families. Personally, I still have to pinch myself when I reflect on my marriage of 8 years with my husband, James (our CFO). I never thought I would be able to get married and this company is one of the many fruits of our decade of being together.
Every part of my journey in life, and in particular these last 20 years, have been necessary to bring me to this moment. The times where I was scared, hopeless, confused, angry, content, happy, joyful, envious, jealous, and numb were all part of this process.
What’s next?
Our goal is to get established in Austin and collaborate with others who work with adolescents, adults, and families. Fundamentally, we want to be an alternative to having to ‘go away’ for treatment and in particular, aim to interrupt the cycle of treatment some clients get stuck in.
Contact Info:
- Email: mestey@thembcollaborative.com
- Website: ATX-TheMindBodyCollaborative.
Com
