We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Cyla Fisk. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Cyla below.
Hi Cyla, really appreciate you opening up about a very personal topic with the hopes that it can help someone out there who might be going through it. What can you share with us about your journey with postpartum depression and how you overcame PPD? For readers, please note this is not medical advice, we are not doctors, you should always consult professionals for advice and that this is merely one person sharing their story and experience.
I unfortunately didn’t have any experience supporting individuals with postpartum depression prior to going through it myself. I knew that a mental health issue was taking over due to my experience working with depression and anxiety, but like many women who have experienced this specific diagnosis, I found myself doing a lot of googling before I found the specialized support I needed. It was an isolating and trying process. What worked for me was a combination of psychiatric medication (i.e. Lexapro), body work (i.e. acupuncture and craniosacral therapy), social and child support (i.e. child care and a mom tribe), and psychotherapy from a certified perinatal mental health therapist and trauma specialist (i.e. what I am now!). It’s so important for women to know that recovery is possible, but that it does require well rounded emotional, physical and social support. Each of these things by themselves I noticed went a long way in helping me feel better, but it was definitely the combination of them that helped me truly thrive again.
Now that I specialize in helping women overcome PPD and PPA (postpartum anxiety), I try my best to take the guesswork out of how to recover for my clients and help them overcome their diagnosis in a more quick and supported way than I experienced. I offer them all of the tools and resources I have learned to help them develop their own unique treatment approach. There is no one size fits all approach. But some common denominators for most of us who have overcome PPD are lots of support from understanding and validating individuals, an increase in self-compassion and self-care, reprocessing of childhood trauma and attachment wounds, and either medication or body based care.
Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
Hi! My name is Cyla Fisk. I’m a licensed psychotherapist and owner of Her Space Los Angeles where we help women grow, heal, and find themselves at each new stage of their lives. Though I work with many mental health concerns throughout the lifespan, I specialize in perinatal mental health and trauma therapy. Working with moms as well as individuals ready to overcome childhood attachment wounds and trauma is something I’m passionate about. As a mom myself and someone who has done a lot of personal trauma work, I am very compassionate and understanding toward the women who enter my practice to do this type of work. I’m currently in the process of hiring my first employees so that my company will be able to reach even more women in our community. I plan to supervise and mentor pre-licensed clinicians interested in growing their clinical skills with this population so that they may offer highly specialized and expert care to our clients.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
The three qualities that I have found to be most impactful in my journey have been self-compassion, determination, and creativity. Self-compassion was definitely a skill that I had to develop farther into my journey. I grew up with high expectations of myself and did not have the kindest inner dialogue when I did not meet those expectations. Determination and creativity on the other hand have always been a part of my nature. I was a dancer for 20 years and always determined to succeed artistically and in my education. As with most things, I believe that both nature and nurture play a role in the qualities that radiate from us. But I don’t think that something has to be in our nature to develop if it is something we value. If you want to be more determined, follow your passion and curiosity as well as strengthen your feelings of self-worth and self-confidence. If you want to be more self-compassionate, heal childhood wounds and do the inner work to challenge and reframe your ways of thinking about yourself and the world. If you value creativity, collaborate with people who think or do things differently than you to open your mind to new possibilities and experiment with new ways of being. This may be oversimplified, but I hope that it gets a the point across that qualities can in fact be developed and are worth working for if you value them.
What do you do when you feel overwhelmed? Any advice or strategies?
It’s easy to fall into a state of overwhelm when trying to balance an emotionally heavy job and building a company with managing my own needs and that of my family. Keeping my head above water takes consistent intentionality. Of course, I’m not always successful at keeping the overwhelm at bay! But I have come a long way in decreasing how often I succumb to it and how long it lasts. Preventing the overwhelm from taking over has taken the longest to learn. My own therapy from a somatic therapist has been the key to achieving this. It was very important for me to firstly gain awareness as to what the buildup of stress and other emotions felt like in my mind and body. I got to know what physical sensations and thoughts arose whenever I began to feel out of control. This helped me to catch symptoms of stress early on so that I could then use varying self-soothing tools to ground and regulate myself.
My own self-soothing tools range from small mindfulness and somatic exercises to activities that take up more time like yoga and spending time in nature. It’s important to find the tools that work for you and to have a multitude of options to choose from for varying scenarios. You’ll find that some tools are very productive when your distress is low but that you need a different set of tools once the overwhelm has taken over. When that happens to me, I usually need to just ride the wave of emotion or panic, use distraction techniques and sometimes call a trusted friend or family member for support. It really takes a lot of trial and error!
Contact Info:
- Website: herspacela.com
- Instagram: @herspacetherapyla
Image Credits
Amanda Quinlan
