Today we’d like to introduce you to Elizabeth Mann.
Hi Elizabeth, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I always knew that I would be in a helping profession. Early on, I wanted to be a nun because of the service element of it. Soon after my dad was in a life-altering car accident, I thought I might want to be a nurse. Later on, when a classmate completed suicide, I reaffirmed that I wanted to be with people while they walked the dark parts of their path. But it wasn’t until college, when I was working a student job and heard many stories of foreign exchange students and some of the difficulties they encountered, it finally clicked that I wanted to be a psychotherapist. By this time, I had been through a slew of my own difficulties that led to me being academically suspended from college. I rallied and started over and worked my way back to a place where I was able to earn my bachelor’s degree in psychology. After that, I moved to Mississippi. I had a terribly difficult time finding a job with a bachelor’s degree, but eventually was able to find a position at a psychiatric residential treatment facility. While there, I had a mentor who pushed me to pursue my masters. I decided that my master’s journey would be entirely different from my undergraduate one and was able to get involved in many different projects and graduated summa cum laude. From there, I began my first therapy job and felt like a fish out of water. I was lucky enough to have a professor warn us that we wouldn’t feel completely prepared right out of grad school, but I will remember my very first client session for the rest of my life. It was with an 8 year old who didn’t care that I had a carefully thought out plan for the session, and I had to quickly learn to adjust. Over my career, I have worked as a direct care worker, therapist, done day treatment, and now am in private practice, which I opened in February of 2022. I currently run the business side and provide all of the therapy as well. My primary interests/populations are people who would like to do inner child work, process trauma, or who are interested in incorporating energy healing into their work.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
It definitely has not been a smooth road. I thought I was going to be a musician going into my college career and that quickly changed when I got a first-hand look at the life a musician lives. Between a toxic relationship and my grandmother dying, I slipped into a downward spiral very fast my second year of college and ended up being academically suspended. I had to go to community college to get my GPA back up and had to have some tough conversations about prospects for grad school because of my GPA. I was incredibly fortunate to have a couple of people in my corner that I met while in Mississippi that encouraged me to apply despite my difficulties, and I was admitted. It took me a long time to build the confidence to apply, though, and I worked some jobs that I strongly disliked in the interim. During grad school, my husband was also going to nursing school so finances were incredibly tight. My ability to work a job was limited and we faced car repossessions and eviction notices – again we were lucky to have support systems in place that helped us through that, but it was stressful nonetheless. Being a therapist is a unique journey in that you are constantly having a mirror held up to you and that can create difficulties early on if they are things that you haven’t dealt with yourself. That journey is always unfolding but it definitely feels different now than it did when I first started.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I am a psychotherapist with a social work degree that specializes in working with people who want to do inner child work and process traumatic experiences. The idea behind my business (Winding Path Counseling) is that many people get stuck “following someone else’s path” whether that is through societal expectations, family norms, parental expectations, wanting to fit in, etc. and that we can help people feel aligned and the ability to be their authentic selves by identifying what their path actually looks like. I am most proud of my eclectic approach to therapy; I truly believe that people have to be worked with from a systems perspective, but externally and internally. So often, we spend so much time on the biological, psychological, and social pieces but shy away from conversations about spirituality, culture, and politics that we can get stuck. What sets me apart from others is that all domains are welcome, celebrated, and even developed in the context of our work together. I use accelerated resolution therapy and reiki-assisted psychotherapy to support people in gently processing experiences in a way where they don’t have to tell me anything in order for it to work.
Before we let you go, we’ve got to ask if you have any advice for those who are just starting out?
If you are just starting out, do your own work. Have a therapist for yourself so that when things inevitably come up for you in the therapeutic relationship, you can address them. You will have a supervisor, too, but their role is different and is tied to your employment. Keep learning about yourself and be the real you with people; they know the difference.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://wpcounseling.org
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/wpcounselingllc
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/wpcounselingllc
