The next therapist I am excited to introduce you to is Dr. Andrea Seldomridge, who is currently a psychological associate (PSB94026434) working closely with me as I have the privilege of supervising her work (Dr. Erica Wollerman, PSY25614). She is one of the most intentional and detail oriented therapists that I have ever worked with and brings a depth of knowledge and understanding to her clinical work that is pretty impressive! She has rare new client openings even in afternoons! ![]() Who do you LOVE working with? I love working with children, teens, and young adults. Getting to walk alongside clients and witness both their struggles and growth is a true privilege. As a queer therapist, working with members of the queer community is something near and dear to me. I love having conversations around what it means to develop a queer identity! Additionally, I love working with folks experiencing anxiety, school stressors, religious issues, interpersonal resolution challenges, identity development, and transitions into young adulthood. What should potential clients know about you and your style in therapy? I like to strike a balance between structured and unstructured. I often will bring in tools that may help them with what they’re coming in for, such as depression or anxiety. However, I always want to meet the client where they’re at and utilize a more conversational and organic approach. What is your favorite parenting tip or recommendation? Less is more! Often it can be so hard seeing kids and teens about to make mistakes. Instead of stepping in each time, allowing them to make mistakes can be such a great way to help them grow, mature, and build confidence. What advice would you like to have received when you were younger? Whatever you are anxious about likely won’t matter in a year, so you will get through it! What do you like to do in your free time? I love to run (aka go on “gentle jogs”), throw a lacrosse ball around, and watch a movie and make popcorn each weekend. At Thrive, we take a positive, client-centered approach to therapy that is focused on creating a genuine connection with our clients. If you would like to talk with Dr. Andrea Seldomridge, or a Thrive Therapist about yourself, your child, or teen attending therapy we offer in person and video sessions, please reach out to us by phone at 858-342-1304. As the founder of Thrive, I have the privilege of working closely with some truly amazing therapists. My Thrive Team! In the next blog series, I am going to be introducing you to them one at a time. ![]() Who do you LOVE working with? Being a therapist brings me so much joy! I have the privilege to connect with individuals from all walks of life and see the world through their lens. I love my work with adolescents, adults, and parents. Working with the BIPOC community is something I am passionate about as a BIPOC clinician myself. I enjoy supporting clients experiencing anxiety, life transitions, identity challenges and interpersonal struggles. What should potential clients know about you and your style in therapy? My therapeutic approach looks to help individuals become more understanding, accepting and compassionate in dealing with themselves and those they love. I believe in creating a safe and non-judgmental space for my clients. I strive to make them feel comfortable and supported throughout our sessions. My goal as a therapist is to support my clients on their journey towards improved mental well-being, and to empower them with the tools and insights to navigate life's challenges. I do this by taking an integrative approach to therapy. This means that I draw from various evidence-based therapeutic modalities and techniques, tailoring my approach to meet their unique needs. I also recognize the importance of cultural sensitivity and strive to create a culturally inclusive environment. I respect and value diversity, and I am committed to understanding and addressing the unique challenges clients may face based on their cultural background. I work alongside my clients, supporting, guiding, and rooting them on as they brave the challenges life can sometimes bring. My clients are as much my teachers as I am theirs. My clients never cease to amaze and inspire me with their strength, courage, and resilience. What is your favorite parenting tip or recommendation? That your child is a whole person with the same feelings we have, but with developing brains and very limited experience with these emotions. So remember your child is having a hard time, not giving you a hard time. What advice would you like to have received when you were younger? I wish I was told that all feelings were valid and okay to express. That acting strong and like you can handle everything on your own will catch up to you. It’s okay to not be okay and to ask for help. What do you like to do in your free time? I love to watch my son play baseball. I also love spending time with my family, especially going to Padres games together! I also enjoy reading and dabbling in photography. At Thrive, we take a positive, client-centered approach to therapy that is focused on creating a genuine connection with our clients. If you would like to talk with Dr. Maria Fowlks, or a Thrive Therapist about yourself, your child, or teen attending therapy we offer in person and video sessions, please reach out to us by phone at 858-342-1304. By: CanvasRebel |
Alexina Clarke is a Registered Associate MFT (AMFT110916) who is supervised by Jennifer Gonzalez (LMFT98444) | Alexina Clarke, AMFT Alexina is a rare find. She is an associate therapist who also has a lot of specialized experience as she was trained specifically in Emotion Focused Therapy working with couples as well as individual clients. While she does not work with children, Alexina brings a unique perspective to her work with individuals as she views everything from a systemic and relational perspective that I find fits well with the rest of us at Thrive. Plus, she is bringing a whole new service to Thrive by offering couples therapy! Alexina impressed me with her ability to connect with and understand the complexity of situations in a very deep and intuitive way that I think allows her to work with a lot of different presenting issues. She definitely is a welcome addition to our team! If you would like to read more about Alexina and her approach in therapy - please check out her bio here. If you would like to connect with her to discuss how she can help you and your family, please call us today! Link this to our phone number please! |
Ying-Ying Shiue is an Associate Professional Clinical Counselor (APCC 5349) who is supervised by Jennifer Gonzalez (LMFT98444) | Ying-Ying Shiue, APCC Ying-Ying is indeed a perfect fit at Thrive! She works with everyone we all love working with - children, teens, parents, families, and adults and is incredibly easy to get along with. Her warmth and easy going personality won us all over pretty quickly. However, Ying-Ying is much more than just someone who can get along with all of us - she truly has the experience and ability to connect with clients quickly and then help them move into a place of change with her support. Her insight, easy going nature, and ability to address and understand complex challenges make her a huge asset to our team! If you would like to read more about Ying-Ying and her approach in therapy - please check out her bio here. If you would like to connect with her to discuss how she can help you and your family, please call us today! |
Please contact us today to learn more about Thrive, our team and how we can support you and your family!
As always, thanks for reading and comments are always welcome regarding any issues around child or teen psychotherapy services in San Diego by Thrive Therapy Studio.
To stay in the loop on the services offered and to receive updated information about Thrive, please feel free to sign up for the newsletter through the following link: http://eepurl.com/dsgLNL.
Often, in the therapy world, a lot of us refer to what we do as therapists as “normalizing.” I thought it might be interesting to share about both what that means exactly as well as just how important it is to do this for all of us, especially parents!
When I first start meeting with a client, one of my biggest goals is to build a relationship with them built on trust as well as helping them view themselves the way I often do... As a person who most likely is struggling with something (that is why people come to therapy after all) but who also has strengths and so much to offer the world.
No matter the age, the topic of “is this normal?” or “am I weird?” or “is this crazy?” inevitably comes up. Everyone feels a bit uncomfortable coming to a therapist and sharing their story for the first time, even those of us in the field! As humans, we are driven to connect with others and fear being cast out as “strange, weird, or not normal.” So, my goal is to create a safe space for my clients to know that they can be comfortable sharing anything and everything with me. Even their most shameful secrets or thoughts are fair game and not something that I am going to even have a big reaction to.
You see, I view people from a different perspective than most. I view people from an inherently positive perspective where I believe that we are all doing the best we can in our lives and that we are all flawed and amazing all at once. I also believe that the more we can learn to embrace the parts of us that are deeply challenging, our uncomfortable emotions like jealousy and anger and fear or even our actions we feel terrible about later - the more we can reconcile our identities and grow towards being more integrated people. You see, when we are more integrated and more of our unconscious thoughts and feelings are brought to the light, the more we can act in our lives with intention and purpose rather than acting out old patterns and wounds without even knowing we are doing that.
So, to help with this, my goal is always to help people not feel “other” and “different” for their struggles. This is what we therapists mean by “normalizing” the experiences our clients share with us. I started thinking that maybe this is something I could help other people do too as when anyone shares something tough, it is a great way to be able to respond that actually helps them rather than making them feel worse.
Here are 5 Key Phrases that are simple to incorporate into day to day conversations and that help people feel less alone, weird, or crazy when they are struggling:
- “Same” - One of the most powerful words in our language is “same.” When someone shares something that you can tell is tough and which you relate to, just noting that you would feel the same way can help them feel less alone.
- “I think I would feel that way too” - When someone is sharing something that you don’t quite understand or haven’t experienced, you can just share that you can understand how they are feeling or reacting by noting that you might feel the same way or react the same way if you were in their shoes.
- “That’s totally understandable” - Sharing that you view someone’s reaction, feelings, or experience as understandable or even expected given their situation can also help people feel less alone or ashamed.
- “That makes sense to me” - While this is deep in my therapist toolbox because when I say things like this, it is usually deeply involved in helping a person understand their experience and situation by pulling together patterns and themes, I also think that this sentence is great on it’s own. To share with a person that you get where they are coming from is inherently connection building and going to help that person feel less alone.
- “I don’t think that is ____ (strange, weird, wrong, etc.)” - Whenever a person is sharing a fear about a situation or how they might be perceived as wrong, bad, weird, etc, it can help just to clearly state that you don’t see it that way. For example, if your child is saying that they told a joke that no one laughed at and felt so embarrassed because other people might think they are strange - you can tell them you don’t think it’s strange or that they are strange. Even if you don’t think the joke is that funny (I mean, we’ve all been there!), you can connect with them on that feeling of discomfort when a joke falls flat by adding in “I hate feeling that way - oh it’s so uncomfortable!” And then you can mention that you get that they were telling the joke to connect with their friends and wanted to make them laugh, which is understandable and something everyone likes to have happen.
The trick with these conversations is to just join with the person in the feeling of discomfort or even pain and to not then try to fix it. Sharing it with them can be as powerful as holding an umbrella over someone else’s head when there is an unexpected storm.
As a therapist, I also often use tools like books to help trigger these conversations with younger kids. I was recently shown a preview of a great book now on Kickstarter, called “We’re All Weird.” I’d encourage you to check it out here and full disclosure, if you use my link, I do get a small bonus.
As always, thanks for reading and comments are always welcome regarding any issues around child or teen psychotherapy services in San Diego by Thrive Therapy Studio.
To stay in the loop on the services offered and to receive updated information about Thrive, please feel free to sign up for the newsletter through the following link: http://eepurl.com/dsgLNL.
By: Dr. Wollerman
As the leader in our practice, this was a tough decision for me for many reasons. One, I really want to support my clients and love doing so in person. Two, I really didn’t want this choice to impact people’s access to care particularly during a time where so many of us are understandably feeling stressed, anxious, and even depressed. Three, I also genuinely believe in how calming it can be to have some normalcy in our lives when the world feels like it is falling apart.
Upon reflection, I realized that while I am feeling all these conflicting feelings about it, people might be feeling conflicted even about attending sessions. We all know that there has been a variety of responses to Covid19 and some people continue to feel that we are all “over-reacting.” However, there are also those who are working hard to change their lives in the interest of protecting the most vulnerable in our society. Once I got used to the idea of changing our life and the way we offer our services, the more I realized that this is valuable coping in a time when things are unstable. Perhaps the more we learn to roll with the challenges life hands us, even when they are HUGE like right now, the more we all learn how to refocus on what mattes and how we can connect and cope together through this unprecedented time in our world.
So, I had my first client video sessions in the past few days and realized that this is actually such a great way to connect with my clients! We luckily had very few tech related issues and the sessions felt almost exactly the same as in our office. My clients loved it and I felt thrilled to be able to continue to provide services without feeling any conflict around if I could possibly be exposing my clients to something dangerous.
For those of you on the fence about telehealth, I thought I would share some pros with you!
- You can do it from the comfort of your home
- Video sessions are very similar to in person sessions when you are using a platform with little buffering like we are at our office
- You don’t need to worry about possible transmission of coronavirus
- You can optimize your time as you will not have travel time
These are just simple things that were fun today. The most important reason to continue with telehealth is that you don’t need to cancel your personal growth just because everything else in our world is cancelled. You can still work on yourself, how you are managing the unknown of this situation, and find support. Plus, we are all not sure how long this situation will last and it is going to be important for all of us to schedule in self-care. I feel that many parents in our world who are suddenly home schooling while working, are going to feel the pressure to be in survival mode throughout this situation. I would encourage you to consider the harm and stress of that. Carving out an hour a week to find support and a time for you, is most likely going to be crucial in maintaining this situation as long as we need to.
We at Thrive would be thrilled to help any Californians during this time and are no longer limited to the bounds of who can drive to our office. We are hopeful that this will help extend the people we are able to help, particularly during a time of such challenge and uncertainty in our country. We are even working on strategies of things to do with younger kids in telehealth and ways to continue our work with the whole family!
From our Thrive family to your family, we hope everyone is hanging in there and we look forward to supporting you!
As always, thanks for reading and comments are always welcome regarding any issues around child or teen psychotherapy services in San Diego by Thrive Therapy Studio.
To stay in the loop on the services offered and to receive updated information about Thrive, please feel free to sign up for the newsletter through the following link: http://eepurl.com/dsgLNL.
We will be posting ongoing information to support our families and community during the Covid19 pandemic. Please stay tuned and let us know if there are questions we can help answer!
At Thrive, we have been busily getting ready for the New Year and launching our new and improved groups! We have been proud to offer several groups in the past few years and recently took a pause from offering them to revisit their format and change some things to make them more accessible to the community.
I wanted to make sure I took the time to share in detail with our readers and followers all the info now that we have it set up!
Open Format and Online Scheduling- The groups are now going to have a more open format. Participants will need to contact us to participate and have an intake to make sure they are a good fit for the group and after that, they will receive an online scheduling link. They can then schedule the groups for weeks they would like to attend! There is no commitment other than attending the groups you sign up for!
- Teen Anxiety Group – Wednesdays from 5:00-6:30
- Young Adult Group – Mondays from 1:00-2:30
- LGBTQIA+ Group – Saturdays from 2:30-4:00
We have opened up the calendars in January so feel free to contact us now to get set up to participate!
Blogs from the Thrive Family!
Musings from Erica, Jennifer, Maria, Kim, Andrea, Molly, Abbey, and Ying-Ying
Categories
All
Abbey Stewart
Acceptance
ADHD
Alexina Clarke
Andrea Seldomridge
Angela Bianco
Anoushey Nazir Khan
Anxiety
Attachment
Autism
Behavioral Challenges
Communication
Copin
Coping
Coronavirus
COVID 19
COVID-19
Depression
Divorce
Early Childhood
Emotional Expression
Erica Wollerman
Family
Gratitude
Group Therapy
Holidays
Intention
Jennifer Gonzalez
Kimberly Macias
Lauren Spinelli
Managing Stress
Maria Fowlks
Mindfulness
Molly Llamas
Motivation
New Mother
Panicha McGuire
Parenting
Parenting Teens
Perfectionism
Play Therapy
Resilience
Self Esteem
Teens
Telehealth
Therapy At Thrive
Thrive Team
Ying Ying Shiue
Ying-Ying Shiue
Young Adult
Archives
November 2023
October 2023
September 2023
August 2023
July 2023
June 2023
May 2023
April 2023
March 2023
August 2022
April 2022
March 2022
February 2022
January 2022
December 2021
October 2021
April 2021
March 2021
February 2021
January 2021
December 2020
November 2020
October 2020
September 2020
August 2020
July 2020
June 2020
May 2020
April 2020
March 2020
February 2020
January 2020
December 2019
November 2019
October 2019
September 2019
August 2019
July 2019
June 2019
May 2019
April 2019
March 2019
February 2019
December 2018
November 2018
October 2018
September 2018
August 2018
July 2018
June 2018
May 2018
April 2018
March 2018
February 2018
January 2018
December 2017
November 2017
October 2017
September 2017
August 2017
July 2017
June 2017
May 2017
April 2017
March 2017
February 2017
January 2017
November 2015
October 2015
August 2015
July 2015
June 2015
May 2015
April 2015
March 2015
February 2015
January 2015