We were lucky to catch up with Britta Okes Carlisle recently and have shared our conversation below.
Britta, we are so appreciative of you taking the time to open up about the extremely important, albeit personal, topic of mental health. Can you talk to us about your journey and how you were able to overcome the challenges related to mental issues? 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.
Overcoming my own mental health and physical health challenges has given me both the grace and the courage to support people in their journey to the same. I believe that as a therapist & healer, to some degree you can only take your clients to the depths you have yourself journeyed, and I have deeply committed to my own healing. As a young girl, I spent many years with physical symptoms that myself nor doctors, parents, or teachers could decode at the time to be emotional. I had chronic infections such as strep throat, daily stomach aches, difficulty sleeping, asthma, slow healing coughs and colds and painful periods. In addition, I struggled with severe social anxiety that led me down a path of substance abuse and toxic friendships, something that is also regularly normalized in our society.
I always say how becoming a parent brings up our inner truths about our past that we can no longer ignore. Though I had treated anxiety through medications before, when I became a mother there were deep parts of me that were begging to be seen. It really took me moving across the country away from family and community, digging deep into my stories of pain, longing, and deep feelings of being a freak or outsider. Both of my pregnancies and postpartum periods were riddled with chronic pain, inflammation, intense emotional triggers and all things that I recognize now could have been so much better had I healed these trauma stories before. I was on a path to the common treatments such as piling on more and more pharmaceutical meds, hours and resources spent on doctors with no answers, to finally find my way to the Neo Emotional Release pathway.
After several years of trauma therapy, several intensive emotional release sessions, finding community with women and people who can truly see me, and returning home to Colorado to receive support in parenting, I genuinely have healed addiction, eliminated anxiety, and have stopped all of my physical symptoms in their tracks. I invite all people looking for healing in this way to trust their intuition and their mind/body/soul wisdom, to listen to the communication of symptoms, and find those healing sources for themselves.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
My primary focus now is Soul Midwife; a culmination of healing praxis to usher souls through the great changes and thresholds that we are crossing as a collective, as well as across the threshold of birthing and becoming a parent. I hold healing space as an intuitive somatic healer, utilizing two international methods called Neo Emotional Release (NER) and Spinal Attunement. NER utilizes breath, specific touch on the body & organs and brings the client into the deep subconscious to fully feel, release, and integrate deeply held trauma from birth, childhood, and even ancestral and lineage pain. Spinal Attunement works on the energetic bodies utilizing both the energy of the spine and the energy of TCM meridians to deeply and subtly unwind tensions in the nervous systems and energy meridians. I consider these methods ‘ancient-present-future’ –remembering ancient wisdom, grounding into the present, rebirthing into the future. The work can be very mystical and other-worldly and so I often integrate divination practices such as soul-based astrology, tarot and the spirit of plants and the elements (fire, air, earth, water) to deepen clients’ connection to self and to nature.
I specialize in working with the perinatal population as a licensed therapist, birthworker/doula via my practice Britta Carlisle Integrative Therapies. I have supported clients for 10+ years through pregnancy, birth, loss, postpartum, and the divine transition of becoming parents and emerging as a family. I offer specialized treatments including navigating the labyrinth of pregnancy and birth, embodied birth preparation, hypnobirthing, orgasmic birthing tools, and transformative postpartum and parenting supports. So much of my work extends long after birth has taken place as the new parents integrate their new place in the world.
I currently offer 1-1 sessions, both in person in Evergreen, CO and online. I have various group offerings that I run each year including women’s circles, couples work and beyond the binary internal healing work. I am creating a mentorship container for other therapists and birthworkers who want to deepen their own business; called Heal the Healer launching in January 2024. I am also initiating a series of trainings and workshops through Womb Mystery School that will create healing spaces for teens & young adults beginning to menstruate, their mothers/parents, postpartum women navigating their womb cycles and will be bringing in guest teachers and space holders for older women who are moving through and beyond menopause. I feel it is so important to bring together the maiden-mother-crone spectrum and remember the collective support we have access to.
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?
I feel that my journey into the work I do now has been a soul-guided path since I was very young. My heart has always been dedicated to the mother energy, to a degree that was exceptional as a child. Connecting eyes with each baby in my view for my whole life, caring for friends’ babies since I was 10, that evolving into serious childcare gigs, wholehearted investment in the wellbeing of our little souls. I refuse to minimize this part of my story because I have truly been dedicating my entire life to babies, mothers, and the wellbeing of families, and I feel it illuminates the value of the contributions of young people in our world.
In my teen and college years I was deeply involved in a summer camp that was immersed in nature. This gave me the depth of spirituality, sense of community and even brought me my soul mate– my husband of 10 years. This space provided the deep connection to the stars, to nature, and to human relationships that gave me the drive and hope to bring my soul work out into the public.
I first emerged into my professional work as a social worker, supporting refugee women in Aurora, CO to gather in women’s circles to establish community, build income by making and selling jewelry, as well as training to become birth doulas themselves. This was my first look into the role of a doula to hold space for women, I was enamored. After graduate school, I was on the founding team for a school for Pregnant & Parenting Teens & their children, also in Aurora, CO. This was a dream opportunity, to develop educational support for young parents and their babies, including developing and launching a doula training program for staff and students. I even became pregnant and gave birth to my first child while working there.
After several years, my family relocated to Seattle, WA where I was supported to delve deeper into the clinical mental health realms, where I encountered somatic healing practices and did much of my own healing. I was seeing my clients with deep-held trauma actually heal deep wounds using the body, somatic awareness, and physical practices to express deep emotions. My biggest teacher was my own chronic pain and symptoms that got exceptionally worse during and after pregnancy, I knew there had to be a way out. I have seen that our mental health systems are strained, only serving to perpetuate the normalization of perpetual depression and anxiety, without offering true healing solutions. I know now that body-based trauma work is part of our ancient remembering of our innate ability to heal and connect with self, nature and others– which as a mirror– can heal our greater world and environment.
The encouragement I can give to anyone on their journey is to gaze back at what they loved as a child, what soul desires were calling you at this time? How have these desires or interests shown up again in life? I feel we are all at our best when we are aligned to our own truth, breaking through highly competitive and toxic societal norms to really bring what our soul loves into our communities.
Thanks so much for sharing all these insights with us today. Before we go, is there a book that’s played in important role in your development?
I am a Gemini–I love information and books. I am pretty nerdy in this way because I mostly read non-fiction books and dense texts about dreams, stars, wombs, alchemy, etc. The most impactful book for my journey is Nature and the Human Soul by Bill Plotkin. This text fell into my hands in graduate school and has been a constant reference for me. Plotkin offers a comprehensive wheel of Soul-Centric nature based development across the lifespan including middle age and elderhood–not limiting our soul evolution to passing the basic touchpoints of toddlerhood and adolescence as completing growth. He illuminates the realities of our cultural human development, marked by egocentric states such as ‘obedience, conforming, rebelling, soul suppression, promotion, retirement and withdrawal’ and offers alternatives that are aligned to nature-based development, “the innocent in the nest, the explorer in the garden, the thespian at the oasis, the wanderer in the cocoon, the apprentice at the wellspring, the artisan in the wild orchard, the master in the grove of elders and the sage in the mountain cave” This book has brought me much hope for how we can raise our beloveds, and yet also grief that our current world has not offered the nature-based elder wisdom that I feel is needed for our times. I love humanity, and this book illuminates how we can align our growth as people with the signposts of nature. With our accelerating pace of technologies and rapid changes, believe that being in touch with our bodies and our humanity will keep us all on the right path.
Contact Info:
- Website: brittacarlisleintegrativetherapies.org
- Instagram: @soul__midwife
Image Credits
Photography by: House of Resonance
