Balancing A Growing Practice and Parenting with Lauryn Montgomery of Bloom Counseling Services Ep. 37

Episode Overview

• Episode Topic:
  In this captivating episode of Mastering Counseling, we unravel the art and science of therapeutic empowerment. We dive into the heart of Bloom Counseling Services with Lauryn Montgomery, Owner and Therapist. Discover the inspiration behind establishing Bloom and how Lauryn’s 15 years of expertise shape compassionate counseling, offering families and adolescents a guiding light through emotional challenges. Explore the commitment to creating a safe haven, promoting open communication and emotional healing.
• Lessons You’ll Learn:
  In this segment, Lauryn unveils evidence-based practices and personalized therapeutic approaches that empower adolescents to build resilience, manage stress, and navigate emotions. Delve into real-life examples showcasing Bloom’s transformative impact on adolescent emotional growth. Learn how the practice collaborates with schools and communities, fostering a supportive environment. Gain insights into empowering parents with practical tools for effective parenting in the modern age.
• About Our Guest:
  Lauryn Montgomery is the force behind Bloom Counseling Services. With a passion for empowering families, Lauryn’s 15 years of experience have shaped a practice dedicated to guiding pre-teens, teens, and parents through the complexities of emotional growth. Lauryn’s commitment to creating a nonjudgmental space and implementing tailored therapeutic approaches has made Bloom a beacon of trust and empathy.
• Topics Covered:
  Explore how Bloom Counseling Services nurtures emotional well-being and resilience in adolescents. Lauryn shares strategies for improving communication within families and strengthening parent-child relationships. Uncover how Bloom builds enduring client relationships, adapts services to evolving needs, and contributes to the community through initiatives that raise awareness about mental health. Gain insights into managing the business aspects of counseling, ensuring accessibility and affordability for all.

Episode Transcript

Lauryn Montgomery: So often the barriers to connection with our teenagers is that we as parents are really focused on either teaching them a lesson or we’re asking questions. I find a lot of times parents jump into and geez, myself, I’m a questioner and my husband’s a lecturer. We both do it too with our teens. But I find that working with them to stop asking questions and start listening and stop lecturing, to try to teach a lesson. And modeling, that has really helped improve the connection. 

Becky Coplen: Welcome to Mastering Counseling, the weekly business show for counselors. I’m your host, Becky Coplen. I’ve spent 20 years working in education in the role of both teacher and school counselor. Each episode we’ll explore what it takes to thrive as a counseling business owner. From interviews with successful entrepreneurial counselors to conversations with industry leaders on trends and the next generation of counseling services, to discussions with tech executives whose innovations are reshaping counseling services. If it impacts counseling, we cover it on Mastering Counseling. Hello! Today we get to talk to someone who is empowering families and adolescents to navigate all the parts of growing up and to be able to strengthen their emotional bonds. I’m pleased to introduce to you today, Lauryn Montgomery, who is the dedicated owner and a therapist in “Bloom Counseling Services.” Welcome to the show today, Lauryn.

Lauryn Montgomery: Hey. Thanks, Becky. Glad to be here.

Becky Coplen: Personally to me as a school counselor, I am often reaching out to someone like you to help families who need that ongoing help and more than a school can give. So, I’m really excited to hear what you have to share with us today. How about you start off by going back and talking about your 15 years in this realm, and how have you come to start balloon counseling services?

Lauryn Montgomery: Yeah, sure. This is my second career. Before I was a counselor, I was a school teacher. I taught high school, I taught junior high and I did social studies. So, I taught world history a lot and I found that as I was working with kids, especially in the school that I was in, I felt frustrated often, I could see these emotional needs happening in front of me. But I was neither equipped to help them with it nor in a position with time to help kids. So specifically, I remember this one kid sitting in the back of my class head down, just crying through my entire lesson on the Russian Revolution. And I was sitting there thinking, good Lord, I don’t think Rasputin is really going to help this kid learning about these little bits. I want more of a one-on-one opportunity with kids. So, from there, I started thinking about something different, and I volunteered with my church a lot with the youth program. Again, I found a lot of times there that I would have these teens and pre-teens come to me with issues that I was not equipped to help them with. We went to a big like girls’ retreat kind of thing, and they had a professional counselor there to speak to all the youth leaders. She shared, here’s an overview of some of the biggest issues kids are facing. She talked about self-harm and these different things. I could not get enough, I couldn’t get enough of that information and I wanted more, So I went back to school for my masters. It was slow going. I was a mom, I had a I went back to school and my son was a year and a half old. I just knocked it out little by little. That’s how I came to counseling. So, whenever I joined the profession, I was specifically looking at school-based counseling positions because school was where I was familiar. I like the energy, I like the team atmosphere. S,o I did school-based therapy for a while. And then ten years later, after I had my son, I had my daughter as a fun little surprise. We did a big shift there into something with more flexibility, something where I could control my schedule a little bit more. That’s when I started Bloom, actually right at the beginning of the pandemic. So, it was virtual for a little while, Yeah. And it grew. I, I missed having a team. I really missed working with collaborators and bouncing ideas off of people, and other professionals. So, that’s whenever I started getting the itch to add people to the practice. That’s when it became a group practice. I got an intern that worked with me, then she was wonderful, and I hired her as soon as she graduated. And another person I was providing supervision for who was just fantastic. And I was like, please join me. So yeah, we’re a little team now and we work exclusively with kids, teens, adolescents that emerging adulthood. All the way, till that prefrontal cortex is done cooking and their parents. So yeah, that’s how I got to where I am now.

Becky Coplen: So much of that resonates with me more than we even shared before. Because I myself, 20 years ago was a world history and US history teacher. Then I went into school counseling and yeah, that’s really fun and have worked in youth group in the past as well. So, we have a lot in common, more than we even knew. It’s always great to see how the people we have on here, their careers evolve based on what they really want to help with and what they can’t do in the moment. When you have 25 kids that need to learn about world history and you want to help the one that’s really suffering with whatever they had going on. So very cool story. When you have your practice together and if a client comes to Bloom, how do you provide a safe and non-judgmental space for them? If they’re coming to work with you, either in person or on Zoom or whatever path you use?

Lauryn Montgomery: That’s a great question. So since we work with mostly minors and they already are at, they don’t have as much power and control over their own life. One thing that we do always is an intake with parents first, so that they’re not stuck in a position where they’re talking about their kid in front of their kid. And that way when we meet heir child for the first time. We put all the focus on the kid. Parents have had their time, and we also have shifted to focusing on regular parent sessions so that we don’t get stuck in those little conversations in the therapy room. When the session is over and mom wants to come in and tell me all about something really difficult with the child, we’ve really worked hard to separate so that a parent can have the space to process as a parent, and that not interfere with the child’s space in the therapy room. That’s probably the biggest structural thing we’ve done. Our office is we’re pretty relaxed with our office. We, my favorite thing, actually, this is something I did in my school-based office, and it’s something I carried over into Private practice is a our table is raw wood and so they mark on it, they paint on it. It’s one of those statement pieces to me that, hey, this is a kid’s room, and we’re not precious about stuff. We’re precious about them. That’s what’s most important. And so that’s probably my favorite thing about the way we’ve tried to make our office welcoming. And it’s interesting from working with kids, we have kids as young as two coming in for play therapy all the way up to I’ve got some college students and it’s interesting, the wide age range, how much they love putting their mark on on something. So those are the two sort of things that I didn’t learn in a book, I guess, that I picked up. There’s lots of other things, obviously basic therapy things, but yeah, those I feel like are unique to us. I haven’t seen that as much everywhere else.

Becky Coplen: Yeah, the wooden table, that’s amazing. And kids do want to leave their space, no matter how big or small and no matter how old they are. That’s very cool idea. I’m glad you shared that. And I think it was really important to talk about how separating what the parents want to talk about, and from that time with the children, because we even see that in schools where maybe a teacher wants to talk about a student, it’s like, we can’t do this right now in front of them. It’s just adding to the anxiety and the breakdown of trust. So can you talk about some of the evidence-based practices and tailored therapeutic approaches that you use with your clients?

Lauryn Montgomery: I would say we’re an eclectic practice, but some of the things we throw around evidence-based fall in depending on the child’s specific needs. So I wouldn’t say we’re using one approach across all other than the basic tenets of effective therapy, focusing on the relationship and unconditional positive regard, those kinds of things. Specifically, we do some trauma-focused CBT. I’ve done that with some kids. That’s in fact one of my very first kids. That was such a powerful intervention for her that I was sold. It was like the first kid I tried doing some trauma-focused CBT with, and when we got to that, just working with that gradual right, like that gradual exposure piece with her, and I watched her nervous system grow just in those few sessions. So I still keep on hand a decent bit of trauma-focused CBT and follow that format for a lot of my kids. Something else that the general play therapy approach we take is Adlerian. I do a lot of Adlerian play therapy approaches, which I’ve more recently gotten trained on. My play therapy journey is really weird, but it’s not something I ever wanted to do. I was never interested in it. I told you, a high school teacher, I did not want to deal with the young ones until I was at a school working a case. It was a K through 12 school and I had to. And I found it wasn’t that I didn’t like the young kids, it was that I didn’t know what to do. And it was my own deficit. It wasn’t anything about them. So, when I finally pulled together a whole bunch, I was grabbing any play therapy research I could find. And I had several super. I was getting separate supervision in it, and I had several of my supervisors really say Adlerian play therapy was was their favorite. And when I finally broke down and did like the formal training, I’m like, oh my gosh, this is wonderful. It gives such a great system for working with kids and parents and a structure to how to understand growth. So I would say that’s probably one of my favorites. Newer with evidence would be Brainspotting. There’s not as much they’re working on more research. More and more is coming out, but it’s born out of eMDR. So there’s some similarities there, which is very has lots of research behind it. And that’s something I’m still learning a lot about, still growing in that area, and I’m trying to incorporate that a little more.

Lauryn Montgomery: Those are some great strategies. And isn’t it funny how sometimes we’re afraid or we don’t know what to do, and that holds us back. And then turns out you ended up really liking thats o. 

Becky Coplen: Yeah.

Lauryn Montgomery: So with those strategies and. The interventions that you’re doing. Talk to us about how you’re seeing that. Help adolescents be able to connect better with their families and form stronger emotional bonds. Sure. So the Adlerian piece has been really nice for me because it’s given me a framework of how to talk to parents and help parents understand their kids’ behavior more. And so that’s really helped a lot when it comes to building that relationship between child and parent, helping parents unhook their own feelings about it, and rather try to take the approach of understanding their child and seeing that it’s not necessarily personal. These are the motivations and the triggers happening for this child, or sometimes completely separate from parents. And then also empowering for parents because it gives them an idea of what they could do, a way that they can reach out. So that’s been really nice from that we do. In fact, I’ve used some formats from the filial therapy model to help parents play with their kids and coach them on. Hey, how are we going to strengthen your relationship with your kid? By working smarter, not harder. Sometimes the activities parents would be doing with their kids aren’t necessarily giving them the best return on investment of their time. And I found that if they can be very focused with these special play times where they’re being very intentional with the way that they’re playing with their children, that can create the stronger bond than necessarily a lot more time. But having that time to focus. So that’s one of my favorites for youngers. And then with my teenagers, I do an I of my own thing with them, actually a modified Imago therapy approach and family sessions. A lot of that work is teaching kids to communicate their feelings, identify and communicate them, and teaching parents how to listen and reflect. So it’s almost like we go back to the therapy 101, those very basic therapy skills that we pick up, the reflective listening, reflecting content, reflecting feeling. And I usually structure those with parents and teens where the teen is the talker and the parent is the listener, until they can get really comfortable with those roles. Because what I find is so often the barriers to connection with our teenagers is that we as parents are really focused on either teaching them a lesson or we’re asking questions. I find a lot of times parents jump into and jeez, myself, I’m a questioner and my husband’s a lecturer. So, we both do it too with our teen. But I find that working with them to stop asking questions and start listening and stop lecturing, to try to teach a lesson, and modeling, has really helped improve the connection. I’ve had kids be like, I’ve been saying, this is just my parents never taken the time to listen, and that can be really impactful for a lot of our parents when they really hear their kid and where their kids coming from.

Becky Coplen: This episode is brought to you by mastersincounseling.org. If you’re considering enrolling in a master’s level counseling program to further your career, visit Masters in Counseling. Org to compare school options via our search tool that allows you to sort by specific degree types, tuition, our costs, online flexibility, and more. Just going off of that a little bit. What would you say some of the coping mechanisms are that you are trying to give to the children and the teenagers and the college people that you’re working with?

Lauryn Montgomery: Mindfulness. I love translating that to that wide range of ages. So, working on getting them connected to their own body is a lot. Getting them to notice those things and just increasing their awareness is a big one for us. As far as specific coping skills. Oh well. And I do love some of the DVT skills as well. I do that a lot with my teenagers. I’ll do get them to look at their whatever’s going on for them with the rational and emotional mind model, and try to find the balance in between where the wise mind is. I found doing it and there used to Venn diagrams at school, so I found that’s been pretty responsive. They’re able to recognize those things. Something else that I’ve done a decent bit with, especially those sort of middle school and adolescence, those earlier adolescents is just decision-making. There’s a lot of things. They just don’t know how to lay it out there. So Pro-con lists working with them to play the tape forward, like, okay, if I make this decision, how what are the possible outcomes? And just considering those things because they feel so overwhelmed a lot of times with decisions, they’re just not sure what to do with them.

Becky Coplen: The decisions. At our school we run a rewards store and it’s always a fun thing, but it’s amazing to me. Some of the kids that have had the hardest struggles at home or in their past cannot decide they will not. They do not want to commit. And it’s so I don’t know, it just feels like a study I should do because they don’t want to commit to the one thing because they’re so worried about other the other things. So yeah, I like that you’re helping them with those decisions and trying to help them narrow it down. I think it holds people back a lot.

Lauryn Montgomery: Yeah, yeah. Unhooking that, that fear of failure. Because then it’s what’s the worst that happens. And if that worst happens looking even past that, oh I’ll be okay. Get it. Getting them. Golly man. There were a really great program to just help kids fail. That would be fantastic, right?

Becky Coplen: Yeah. Being comfortable with some failure is good. Oh, awesome. Well, maybe you have some examples of working. You used to work in a school, but how are you working now with schools in your community? And let’s talk about that angle and perspective, our counselors referring to you or how does that go?

Lauryn Montgomery: That is a great question. And actually that’s an area that I’m hoping grows even more so currently in our community, we see kids from our county and some neighboring counties, but the high school that we’re closest to has a mental health liaison. I think that’s her title, mental health director, who’s wonderful. And so I’ve gotten a lot of connection through that. They even have a sort of scholarship therapy funds through an alumni fund. So they really try to stay connected to the local providers to get kids into therapy when they need it. So that’s been really cool. And I’ve even reached out to the administration at that school before, because I have so many students from that school. For example, last year I had probably 3 or 4 teenagers reading the same book in their English class, and it was a deep it was an intense book, and it ended up spurring a lot of discussion in therapy. This book that they were reading in English class, and each one of them grew in their own understanding of themselves and their own challenges. And that was a time I reached out to the local administration, and I was like, hey, this is a really great experience for a lot of these kids outside of just whatever they’re learning in the classroom. I just, I mean, I know teachers, man, that’s a tough job. And you don’t always know what your kids are taking home. So that was the way I wanted to encourage them. Like, what a great way that unit was really working for their students in a bigger way. Other than that, we work a lot in the elementary schools. We stay pretty connected to the guidance counselors that we have, where we have our kids, and then sometimes teachers as well. We’ve had several situations where we’ll work. The teacher will send the kids a behavioral plan. They’ll send what’s happening at school so that we can hopefully complement what’s happening there. Sometimes we collaborate together. Hey, I’m noticing this is really stressful for this kid. I wonder if we tried it a different way, but it’s made a big difference for some of our kids, so those would be the biggest. I would like to get more involved in schools. I would like to do more groups and things like that, but there’s no room for that on the plate right now.

Becky Coplen: We can’t do everything, that’s for sure. But you talk often that they have that liaison. That’s really huge. And I’m sure being with teachers every day, they greatly appreciated you letting them know about all that was coming out of the novel that they were reading. So that’s a really great example, I love that. Let’s just talk about how you began. I think you said you started this practice right before COVID-19 and how during that time and then to now, how have you adapted just to things changing so fast, so many different issues that come up? Have there been a lot of changes from when you initially began in to now well into 2023?

Lauryn Montgomery: Yes, I officially started with my first client in April of 2020, so and honestly, it was something I’d wanted to do for a while and I just had more time at home to be able to do it. Initially we were virtual-only for those first few months, and I think I started brick and mortar and seeing clients in person that fall, maybe August or September of that fall. And I saw such a fast growth, I could not see everyone that was coming to me, but it was such a boom. Everyone was worried about their children’s mental health. That’s been interesting how that’s played out. The levels of anxiety were such a big thing in my own home. I was watching with my own son at that time who was in like he was in third grade. It was the end of third grade. Yeah. For him and watching all of that play out, it was interesting how much time in therapy was spent with kids just processing the pandemic. I remember this kid. I had these like, dolls that you can pose, but they don’t have faces or anything. And this kid cutting out masks to put on them and then being like, no, stay away during a play therapy session and just thinking, wow, that is not something that would have shown up nine months ago. Yeah. So the biggest thing that I’ve noticed business-wise, though, was this huge boom in mental health. And I had a waiting list that it was so long I’m trying to pull. That’s when I took on an intern to try to help with some of that load. That’s when I took on, and then I took on another therapist. And then watching that kind of drop off, that was an interesting. And I got a little bit of validation. I listened to the therapy for Your Money podcast. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Julie Harris, and they talk a lot about that from the business side of a private practice, how that was the theme that all their private practices were seeing. We had this huge boom because everyone was wanting mental health care for their children. And then as life went back to normal, people’s panic died down and that sort of leveled off. So managing like as soon as I started my practice with that boom. Now over this past year, managing that sort of drop-off has been an interesting challenge for me business-wise, and we’ve had to get creative in understanding that and understanding our families and our area that we serve. But yeah, that’s the biggest. And then honestly, it was nice. Now that everyone’s so familiar with telehealth, if I’m in a spot that I need to stay home, but I still don’t want to cancel on my clients, I have a home office and I can come to my office and I can still see them. Clients that are not feeling great or have other issues. They don’t have to miss a therapy session if they don’t want to. So honestly, it’s created a lot more opportunities. I feel like with accessibility when it comes to that, even when it’s not necessarily an illness. But you know, I have some families that drive a little bit of a ways. I have one family that drives like an hour, and that’s tough. And instead of lessening the therapy time, it’s that morning, hey, it’s a really rough morning. Can we do virtual today? Absolutely we can. It’s been such a great supplement to therapy and made it, I think, more accessible and more flexible to people’s real lives.

Becky Coplen: Yeah, that’s so interesting. And all I keep hearing from a lot of people is the boom. And it’s continuing to grow in mental health, but that’s I’m glad you brought out that perspective that kids definitely had more time in 2020, 2021 and then, and everyone wanted the help. And I can see how, especially in the age group, that you’re working with, how it might have gone down because most people are back to all their activities and fitting in another part of their life is harder not dealing with weather or illness. Most people who have kids or teenagers are. They mostly signing up for in-person or telehealth or is it like 5050?

Lauryn Montgomery: Oh no. Most people want in person. We have a little bit of a space problem. So each of our therapists has a virtual night, and by far they all want the in-person if possible. I would say there’s maybe 10%, maybe 10% of our clients prefer the virtual. We do all our parent sessions virtually. So that kind of helps a little too, because parents can do it in the middle of their day, and especially when we’re working with really small children, for sure we prefer it as well. So.

Becky Coplen: Yes, yes. Very cool. Why don’t you just talk to us a little bit about, you said you have two people that are part of your business as well. Just explore. If someone looks you up and contacts you, are they calling specifically for one of your therapists or do you guys hear the needs? And then you guys have more specific niches that can help each family?

Lauryn Montgomery: Yeah, that’s a great question. That’s been part of our work this year, is really figuring out who our ideal clients are, each of us, and where we shine the best. Who are the clients that seem to benefit the most from each of our styles? So yes, Robin, one of our therapists, she came on specifically because she was doing high school, school-based, and she really missed working with younger children. She had a lot of training in play therapy and especially person-centered or child-centered play therapy. And she was missing that. And so she really loves working with that younger age group. And especially her favorites are like the rambunctious boys, the ones that are ADHD-type symptoms, whether they actually have ADHD or not. She really likes working with them. Really. She likes working with so many. And then Sarah. She was our intern who joined as soon as she graduated. She does a little bit more of a structured approach. She’s a little bit more directive in her therapy. She actually handles all of her incoming. She’s a therapist, but she also does some admin and our client relations work. So she they call in and Sarah listens and depending on insurance as well on schedule helps match with the therapists. That feels like the best fit.

Becky Coplen: Yeah. People we interview on here, some of them have really huge practices. Some of them are by themselves. And so it’s just good for our listeners to hear all the different ways and how the structure of the administration works. If you were to go back either way, back to when you became a teacher or when you shifted careers, what are some things that you wish you knew that you would want someone who’s considering this field to consider?

Lauryn Montgomery: I wish that I had more examples of people starting their own private practice. I’ve had some amazing people share their stories with me and that’s been so helpful. I just wish I’d gotten them sooner. Partially because I’m a planner and I take a long time to make decisions, so I like to be thinking about them for a long time. So the more examples I have, the better. I also think, personally, I would have liked to have more of a foot in the play therapy world earlier. I didn’t do that until after my master’s completed, and so I wish I’d known more then about all the different specialization options, because the advice I kept getting when I would ask, well, what if I want to specialize in a specific demographic? Or. And the advice I always got was you get supervision in it after you graduate. That’s how you do. And that’s how I’ve done. Most of my learning has been through people who are more specialized in them, sharing their knowledge. But wish I had known a little bit more about what I could have done then. I wish I had known a little bit more about the possible path to specialize in the different areas, if that makes sense for sure.

Becky Coplen: Lauryn, you shared so many great things with us today, and I loved how your journey evolved, and I really loved how you brought out the community aspect and how tightly you work with the schools. That’s really amazing and inspiring. So thank you for being with us today.

Lauryn Montgomery: Yeah, thanks so much. It was a pleasure.

Becky Coplen: All right. You have a wonderful day. And to our listeners, thank you for being a part of this. We’d love to hear your feedback on social media. We look forward to you listening into the future. As we talk to many other professionals in the business and world of counseling and therapy. Have a wonderful day!

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