Meet Carey Gil

We recently connected with Carey Gil and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Carey, really happy you were able to join us today and we’re looking forward to sharing your story and insights with our readers. Let’s start with the heart of it all – purpose. How did you find your purpose?

After 15 years of working in the social services field in Santa Clara County, I thought that I had seen and heard it all. I’d worked with numerous families struggling to make ends meet and to create healthy relationships with their children. What I began noticing, however, was that despite our best efforts to support families, we often fell short with those who had experienced the most trauma. Why didn’t our approaches seem to work? Foster and adoptive families, in particular, seemed to struggle the most. Simultaneously, I was struggling in my own efforts to parent my youngest child. Shouldn’t I be an “expert” at this by now? Why didn’t the techniques that worked for my two eldest children work for this one?

When I found the Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI), it was like a lightbulb went on. Subsequently, while learning more about current neuroscience around sensory issues, attachment and fear-based responses I realized that the “traditional” parenting techniques that I was using were actually the opposite of what my child, and traumatized children, need. In fact, it was making it worse by increasing their emotional reactivity and damaging their trust in building safe relationships with adults. I tried the techniques at home and found my relationship with my child revolutionized. It then became my mission to teach and coach parents, caregivers and the future generations of social workers this new approach– and to create trainings and programming which increased access to this type of support for all who could benefit, regardless of income level.

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 journey in social work started when I moved to the Bay Area over 25 years ago. In my time, I’ve worked extensively with system-involved families through my therapeutic roles at Pacific Clinics, Planned Parenthood, and Catholic Charities’ Refugee Foster Care Program. After many years of working for other people, I decided to take my creative energy and focus it into creating the type of agency that I dreamed of working for.

I launched my nonprofit group counseling practice, Lotus Family Services, in 2024 as an expansion of the work I was doing in my own private practice. We chose a nonprofit model to be true to our mission of increasing access to quality, trauma-informed services for all, regardless of income level. Our determination to provide both quality mental health services and ethical, sustainable practices for our clinical staff created a unique hybrid model. We’ve created a special space where we truly embody the principles of trauma-informed care. Our family-centric approach recognizes the importance of supporting the whole emotional system surrounding an individual in order to support real and lasting change. Instead of working with just kids, we work with the parent-child dyad and the caregivers to truly create lasting change.

We focus on family stress and trauma and currently have clients ranging from ages 3-73. Our clients come to us looking for support with some of life’s biggest challenges– divorce, healing from violence or childhood abuse, navigating foster and adoption systems, separation due to incarceration or immigration, and the stress of parenting high-needs children. We give them real, practical support that actually works! Whether it’s through art and play therapy, TBRI parent coaching and family therapy, or working with our in-house therapy dog Friday, our clients experience true care and relief. We are expanding our services in 2025 to include more community-based groups and trainings as well as family bonding workshops and retreats. We’re the only program of our kind in our area!

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

The qualities of humility, empathy and creativity have been instrumental in my journey. I truly believe that my clients are the experts of their own lives and learning how to best support them is an ongoing learning process that requires me to put them front and center and my own ego on the backburner. Empathy allows me to learn how to “look out their window” to experience the world in the way that they see it, not as I have. In doing so, I can truly step into their world and help them make meaningful change. Finally, creativity is a daily part of my work and keeps me feeling alive! In every social work setting I have been employed in, I have always looked at ways we could improve and innovate on the services we were providing. Whether it was creating a holiday gift donation program for our young adult foster children, family bonding retreats for foster/adoptive families or inventing therapeutic games to play with children during sessions, I have always valued “out of the box” thinking and new ways to innovate on tried and true concepts.

One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?

We have been very fortunate to collaborate with excellent community partners in the adoption and foster care space over the past few years. This coming year, we are looking to expand our work with kinship, foster and adoptive parents by providing more family-centered mental health services as well as family bonding workshops and retreats. Additionally, we would love to see our services reach more families going through the stress of the family court (divorce, separation) system. Our ideal partners to collaborate with would be social service centers, divorce attorneys, retreat and wellness spaces willing to create space to host our families for events and retreats, and other local organizations actively supporting families through the entire foster-adoption continuum. Anyone interested in referring clients or discussing more can contact us through our website: www.lotusfamilies.org

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.lotusfamilies.org