Balancing Growth and Quality Care in Holistic Psychotherapy with Diane Webb of With Grace Mental Health Counseling PLLC. Ep.67

Episode Overview

• Episode Topic:
  In this episode of Mastering Counseling, we discuss the intricacies of children and teens counseling with Diane Webb, co-founder of Grace Mental Health Counseling. Diane shares her holistic approach to mental health, emphasizing the importance of specialized care for young clients. The conversation delves into how trauma and anxiety can uniquely affect children and teenagers and how innovative techniques like EMDR and Brainspotting can provide effective treatment. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in understanding the nuances of mental health support for the younger population.
  
• Lessons You’ll Learn:
  Listeners will gain valuable insights into the field of children and teens counseling, particularly through the lens of Diane Webb’s extensive experience. Diane explains how a traumatic car accident redirected her career path towards mental health, ultimately leading her to co-found Grace Mental Health Counseling. The episode highlights the importance of a supportive work environment for therapists, the benefits of Christian counseling, and the necessity of specialized mental health services for children and teens. You’ll learn how to create a welcoming and effective therapeutic space and the significance of continuous professional development in the counseling field.
  
• About Our Guest:
  Diane Webb is the co-founder of Grace Mental Health Counseling, a practice known for its holistic and faith-based approach to mental health. With nearly two decades of experience in trauma therapy, Diane has developed a reputation for her expertise in EMDR and Brainspotting techniques. Her journey into the mental health field began after a life-changing car accident, which inspired her to make a positive impact in the world. Diane’s dedication to her clients and her innovative approach to therapy have made her a respected figure in the mental health community. She continues to mentor and support other therapists, fostering a collaborative and nurturing work environment.
  
• Topics Covered:
  This episode covers a range of topics centered around children and teens counseling. Diane Webb discusses the foundation and growth of Grace Mental Health Counseling, emphasizing the importance of creating a supportive workplace for therapists. The conversation explores effective therapeutic techniques such as EMDR and Brainspotting, particularly for trauma and anxiety in young clients. Diane also shares insights into the unique challenges faced by children and teens in mental health, the role of Christian counseling, and the future plans for expanding services to better cater to younger populations. Listeners will leave with a comprehensive understanding of the strategies and philosophies that drive successful children and teens counseling.

Episode Transcript

Becky Coplen: So glad to have you back on Mastering Counseling. Today we are so excited to have Diane Webb with us. Thanks for being with us today, Diane.

Diane Webb: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Becky Coplen: She is the co-founder of Grace Mental Health Counseling and kind of has a holistic approach to helping many clients, specifically her with anxiety and trauma in the past and those sorts of things. However, she is part of a practice where they have other clinicians who specialize in all kinds of areas. So we can’t wait to hear about your practice and the work that you’re doing. But why don’t you tell us a little bit about how you got into the mental health world to start?

Diane Webb: Sure. So when I was a young person, about 18 or so, I was an art student to start out. To be transparent, I was in a very horribly traumatic car accident, did a lot of self-reflection, and decided that I wanted to do something that would make the world a better place because I could have almost died in the accident. After something like that, you kind of self-reflect about what would my legacy have been. What do I want to do while I’m here? So I knew I wanted to be in the helping field at that point at like 18, or 19, but I didn’t know it was going to be counseling. So I just took a lot of women’s studies courses, psychology, and I just kind of tripped and fell honestly into counseling. Yeah, and that’s been pretty much all I’ve ever done with my adult life besides having kids.

Becky Coplen: Yes, yes. Well, that sounds like quite a lot. I love the phrase tripped and fell into it. but I’m sure that your love of art and focus on that comes out in the mental health world, I’m sure, a little bit of it does.

Diane Webb: And I’m not alone in that. There are a lot of us in psychotherapy that have a really big creative side. So a lot of the work that I do is out of the box so there’s a lot of creative thinking that goes along with trauma therapy with unique solutions. It kind of I think it uses the same part of the brain that artistic expression comes from. But I have nothing to set up besides intuition,

Becky Coplen: Right. Let’s talk about some of the strategies and practices that you use. I know that you do some work with EMDR and Brainspotting. Can you tell us about that?

Diane Webb: Sure. Yeah, those are my two favorite techniques to use with clients EMDR and Brainspotting. For me, I specialize in all forms of trauma from developmental trauma to single incidents. Also, anxiety, brain-spotting, and EMDR are the perfect match for things like that. I think that these techniques can fast-track a detox from those traumatic memories in a way that other techniques just can’t. That’s just my personal opinion. There are others who agree with you and others who don’t.

Becky Coplen: For sure.

Diane Webb: Yes. But from my experience for almost about 20 years now, I’m doing this work. I always come back to Brainspotting, and EMDR is so helpful. What I love about it is that, well, with trauma, what happens is the memories are stuck. I always compare it to if we had something that was stuck in the digestive tract, right, you want to move it through the digestive system. Similarly, you want to move a traumatic memory through the neurological system. Right. So what happens with trauma? Is it stuck? When you do EMDR brainspotting it gently using your own neurological makeup helps you to move it through your system is what it does. But one powerful part of those techniques is that you can help clients visualize and neurologically start opening the channel for their strengths, for what they want to happen. So you can do both of these things with EMDR and Brainspotting. So that’s what I like to do. I do trauma therapy with people. It’s not just focused on the bad. That’s also about creating the neurological makeup for them to have a great next chapter after this happened to them.

Becky Coplen: Oh, yes, the follow-up and I think strategies for the rest of their life, even if they’re not always in therapy, must be huge for sure. So.

Diane Webb: Absolutely.

Becky Coplen: Yes. Thank you for that. I would love to hear about the name of your practice with Grace Mental Health Counseling. Is there a story behind that, or how did you guys come up with that?

Diane Webb: So my business partner, Nicole Edwards we are extraordinarily close friends. We’re both mothers and therapists. When we’re deciding to join together to create this group practice and come up with a name, we wanted something that was strength-based but also spoke to Faith. Nicole is a very devout Christian and the name with Grace mental health counseling, um was powerful and important for her, and I love the sound of it too. So Went with that, and we do a lot of Christian counseling at our practice.

Becky Coplen: Okay, that’s great to hear. We are. I’m a Christian as well, and my husband is a pastor. So he does a lot of he does some counseling. We have other people who specialize in it more. But that’s great to hear. Yeah, anytime the word grace can be used, I think is awesome. So yeah, thanks for sharing that. Let’s talk a little bit more about your practice. You shared already that you are with your best friend, who is or very close friend.

Diane Webb: She is my best friend, best friend.

Becky Coplen: Okay, I was like, I think she said it, but I don’t want to misquote and then have the wrong friend here. But anyway, that’s amazing to work with someone so close to you all the time. We were talking before about how welcoming your website is and how not only do you want to have amazing help for your clients, but clinicians who work there are treated very well. I’ll let you describe kind of the snack room and the schedule and all of that, but it made me want to try to apply and work there for sure.

Diane Webb: That’s the best compliment ever. So we’re still I we’ve had a lot of growth, but we’re a young practice. We will be six years old this September. Nicole and I, we bear witness to a lot of mistreatment of therapists, and we just want to do things differently. she and I have also had different experiences with that. When I worked for a group practice called Pinnacle Behavioral Health in my area around Albany, I was treated with the utmost respect. They were incredible, and when I opened a group, they were still incredibly supportive of that too. So that said in some other places I worked and places that Nicole had worked as well, it wasn’t that way. Therapists are notoriously taken advantage of and underpaid and expected to not have a lunch break, to not have a work-life balance. There’s a lot that goes wrong in that space, and pretty much what many other practices did. We decided to do a completely different to create the best work environment that we could. The work is hard already. So it’s it’s not like we can make everything perfect, Because the work is inherently difficult. But We have our therapists create their schedules. We do not tell them when they should or should or should not see clients. So they say what days they want to work and for how long. We help our therapists to orient to private practice with mentorship. We make sure that someone’s available for them as much as possible when they need it. We give a lot of supervision. So we have experts on staff in working with kids, in working with couples, I do training for them and with them about trauma therapy to make sure that they get a lot out of the experience.

Diane Webb: We also take the vibe of the office very seriously so we make sure that we have a professional but light-hearted feel. We get together for lunch every Thursday. The practice provides lunch. It’s the little things just to show that we care and that we value them in their time. We just kind of also take a pulse of how you guys feel about the culture here and we take the feedback, A lot of places don’t even ask their staff that right.

Becky Coplen: For sure.

Diane Webb: That’s one thing that we do. So that’s us about the work-family that we have. We enjoy it very much. One thing that we do that I think is a little bit unique to us is we encourage our therapists to specialize and of course not right away. most therapists when they have a limited permit and they’re still getting their hours for licensure. They may want to see a wide variety to fine-tune what they’re interested in and what they’re naturally more good at. Because that’s a thing too. So we encourage that process. When someone is ready to zero in on a population or a topic, we help them to do that by helping them to design what type of credentials they might want to seek next, or what type of advanced training will help them financially with those training and then help them curate a caseload that is fine-tuned to their unique interests and their skills.

Becky Coplen: Will you explain it wonderfully? I loved seeing all the ways that people feel comfortable. You’re right, the work is hard. The stories are hard when you’re hearing people’s trauma. So to be able to lighten the background stress, I guess, of the workplace has to be so huge. So how big is your practice, would you say at this point how many clinicians are part of it?

Diane Webb: Right now, there’s about 25 of us.

Becky Coplen: Wow. For six years and being newer, that’s pretty amazing.

Diane Webb: Yes. We opened six years ago, so it was before COVID happened, I agree, and you never know what’s going to happen in life. no one knew that COVID was happening.

Becky Coplen: Yes.

Diane Webb: And that was a very difficult thing for all of us. No one was immune to that. But one positive thing that came out of that time of life, I think, for all of us, is that there’s more openness to mental health treatment. Mhm. So it’s more widely accepted after that experience. So during COVID, we did expand substantially to help to provide as many as open up services as much as possible. That said, even if we had 100 therapists, we wouldn’t even touch the need probably. But we just do what we can and have peace. That has to be enough for now.

Becky Coplen: Right, right. I also noticed that if you work there, you don’t have to. You have other people who work with the insurance companies. I’m imagining you have some people handling more the business part of it in the air and taxes and all of that. Can you talk about that? What happens behind the scenes?

Diane Webb: Sure. So to accommodate such a huge growth in our company, things are very different today than they were six years ago. so six years ago, Nicole and I were everything Were the HR department. We still don’t have an HR department. But back then there was a joke that, like, if you want to talk to HR, you got to talk to me or Nicole right to provide the support that was needed for this type of growth in the past six years. We have a business director. We have an intake coordinator. we have a billing, a billing team that is separate from us but that worked very closely in conjunction with us for all of our billing needs. So we also have a clinical director one of our therapists got promoted to clinical director a couple of years ago. She’s amazing and does a lot for the practice and for our therapists. So there’s an infrastructure there. Then, of course, we have a payroll that helps us with taxes. Because everyone that works for us is an employee. I’m sorry, I’m so tired because of my being in postpartum. What’s the word for?

Becky Coplen: I’m thinking because I don’t know, I had an idea, but it might be the wrong word.

Diane Webb: Well, they’re W2 employees.

Becky Coplen: Oh, yes. They’re not out in their own private like individuals. They’re not like overnight or whatever.

Diane Webb: Right. Yes. 99.

Becky Coplen: Oh, I did.

Diane Webb: So taxes are taken out of their payroll. We have a great payroll company that takes care of all of that. This is important because we also have their health care premiums that are coming out now, since we’ve grown as an organization, we’re able to get benefits like that sick time like this. So so yeah. So there’s a whole infrastructure on the back end of our business to support everybody. Mhm.

Becky Coplen: Yeah, that sounds amazing. I think so impressive. I mean six years goes by fast and all that’s happened in the world. for you guys to have expanded that much and be able to offer that is so much. So that’s cool. Yeah, I was going I was thinking, we haven’t talked about this out here too often. With you being very open to it, people need the time off. Or if something comes up and they can’t see their clients, how do you guys work on filling in for each other and covering for clients when the therapist has become ill or has a family need?

Diane Webb: Sure. Well, two of us on the team are out on maternity leave right now. Myself and one of our therapists. Then another one of us is out for maternity leave in May. So there’s a lot of that that happens. We work closely together. We will start the process. Well, if we know it’s a maternity leave, we’re going to start the process early about helping to set our clients up for success, to transfer their cases to whoever would be the most appropriate fit for the time. But that said, if someone’s out on an emergency, And let’s say they have like a medical issue that they didn’t foresee before, it’s going to be a while. Then we have the clinical director, myself, and Nicole, who can all help coordinate the care from there either with us or in-house with one of the other therapists. One of the beauties about being such a big team is that at least a few of us are taking new clients at the same time. So if someone’s out we can switch for the time being, that person’s care, That said there’s a lot to be said about not having notice from your therapist, but sometimes emergencies happen, We do our best to acknowledge, right, any feelings of loss or the attachment difficulty with that?

Becky Coplen: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s not as simple as a guest teacher coming into a school, but it sounds like you guys have a pretty good plan. people know things happen to everybody. So. Yeah, but thank you for sharing that with your practice. at 25 people, what in you guys have all kinds of specialties for different needs? What would you say are some of the needs you’re seeing the most? Or if you were thinking about who you might need to hire in the next 2 or 3 years, what type of specialties are you seeing? A lot of that is needed for your clients.

Diane Webb: Far and wide services for children and teens. That’s something that we’ve been accounting for and planning for. There are plans to open a counseling center just for kids pretty soon. because the need is so high, we want it to be a welcoming environment for children. So this new location that we will have when children go in, they’re going to know it’s for them from down from the furnishings to how it looks to how it feels. It’s completely catered to kids even like child-sized furniture and things like that. Yeah.

Becky Coplen: Oh, that’s amazing, I love that. You guys are in New York State and fairly close to New York City.

Diane Webb: No, no, we’re in Albany. Well, we’re north of Albany. So one of our locations is in Clifton Park. We have one in Saratoga Springs. one that’s in Queensbury. So we’re about 2.5 hours north of New York City and the foothills of the Adirondacks right up there. Yeah.

Becky Coplen: All right. No, that’s great. A very specialized place for children. I’m sure you will fill up very fast. That sounds like an in-person in-person censure. Are you guys all in person? Are you hybrid or are some people only virtual?

Diane Webb: We do have some that are only virtual. We have one person that is exclusively virtual in our practice. most of us it’s a hybrid. Some of our therapists prefer in-person, So they’re all in-person with no online services. It’s, again something that we encourage our therapists to think about and design that that. Work-life for themselves, whether that’s online or in person, or a mixture of both. Yes, that’s what we do.

Becky Coplen: Yes, I love it. What would be some advice you would maybe have for people who are going to jump into a master’s in counseling or therapy, people in the middle of the program, or people who maybe almost done in considering joining a private practice or beginning at an agency?

Diane Webb: I have the same advice for all people in all of those stages, and that would be to keep a real open mind and learn about everything with a beginner’s mind. don’t go in thinking that you already know. Go in wholeheartedly. Just willing to learn about a lot of different things. Even the things that you think you have no interest in because you never know that thing you don’t have any interest in could be what your expertise is. When I was in grad school, I was mocking and laughing at EMDR. And now here I am like the biggest fangirl. You just never know, And I probably would have never said that I wanted to be a trauma therapist either. like, it happens to be one of the biggest passions of my life. Now, you just don’t know. Sometimes the thing that you’re a little bit nervous about or don’t want to do happens to be the thing that you really can add value to.

Becky Coplen: Yes, I so agree. It’s funny how thinking back to before, I think being a mom too, as I am as well your perspective changes the things you care about. I know for me, I used to be able to watch a lot of just entertaining TV shows and now that I think of it, it just freaks me out. So we do change so much each decade, and I think that’s great advice for people who are beginning their career that they don’t want to close themselves off too soon to a specific part of this world. So. Well, we appreciate your time today. I think you might be our, I mean, you have other kids, but she just had a baby a few weeks ago, so we are appreciative of your time. You do not look like you had a baby a few weeks ago. You look great.

Diane Webb: I feel like I will say that.

Becky Coplen: Yes. So I think we got a lot of great insight. Especially I love the way that you treat your coworkers and the people who are part of your practice. I think that’s good. I’m sure comes out, and that’s why it’s growing and booming all the time. So thank you so much for that.

Diane Webb: Thank you for having me. So great to meet you.

Becky Coplen: Great to meet you. To our listeners, thank you so much for joining us in this episode. Feel free to leave us reviews or ask questions, and we look forward to our future episodes. Signing off for today is Becky. Have a wonderful day.