We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Stephanie Small. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Stephanie below.
Stephanie, so good to have you with us today. We’ve always been impressed with folks who have a very clear sense of purpose and so maybe we can jump right in and talk about how you found your purpose?
When I was in elementary school and someone asked me “what do you want to be when you grow up?” I used to answer: “An actress-feminist-psychiatrist-writer-international animal rights lawyer-eco terrorist.” (yep. I’m not making that up.)
I have always been interested in too many things, and I like to think that what I have created, and am in the process of creating, is my best answer to my childhood dream.
The thing is, when you’re someone who cares passionately about the planet, our human and non-human relatives, health and healing, justice, and has a flair for the dramatic, it’s not so easy to find jobs on craigslist or Indeed.com that really match your skill set. Especially if you’re born into a family that values accomplishment and status of the more conventional kind. In my early 20s, although I wanted to spend years traveling the earth with only a backpack (and I managed to do so for five months), I felt the pressure to choose a career path, and had my Masters in Clinical Social Work by the time I was 26. I figured that this gave me the best path to start to contribute to the world in the ways that would feel fulfilling. However, I spent many years wandering through the wasteland of community mental health and psychiatric units, taking positions at bureaucratic institutions and always wondering why the administration thought that locking people up, stuffing them full of pills, and handing them worksheets that challenged their thoughts, would actually help them heal. It was in my late 20s that I discovered that I have a compulsive need to enter dysfunctional systems and try to change them. Now I know that the word I was looking for was “decolonize” them, not just change them.
I started by studying holistic nutrition and implementing a food reform program at a locked psychiatric unit where I worked. I also became the client of a traditional healer, and learned ways of healing that had nothing to do with sitting inside a therapist’s office and analyzing my dysfunctional childhood for the tenth time. I eventually launched my private practice in 2012, specializing in somatic (body-centered) psychotherapy and functional nutrition for mental health. Finally I was working for myself and doing more of what I thought would actually help – and the response from my clients was massive.
For a while this felt like enough. Then I started once again to get frustrated with existing limitations. I knew how to do amazing, transformative psychotherapy for clients struggling with their emotional experiences. I knew how to use natural medicine approaches to help them balance their biochemistry and reduce or eliminate their symptoms. But so much of what they were coming in with (and continue to come in with) had to do simply with not living in the way we were intended to live. We wake up in boxes, eat out of boxes, drive in boxes to work in other boxes under fluorescent lights. We spend hours staring into boxes that bring us apocalyptic information from all over the globe. This literally is not how our nervous systems are designed to work, and we are suffering as a result.
In 2018, my soul received a big push when I was honored to be given a spirit name at a Sundance ceremony in Wyoming. I felt compelled to bring my medicine to the world in a bigger way. From that, in 2022, Las Lobas del Corazón, our holistic psychotherapy and health clinic, was born. We accept Medicaid and Kaiser because we believe that these effective, holistic solutions should not be limited only to those who can pay out of pocket. I supervise and train our therapists in the modalities that I learned that have been so very helpful for my clients over the years.
My next phase involves launching online book groups to “gently radicalize” participants, in other words, raise consciousness of oppressive systems and help us to dream the new ways forward. We just finished our first three groups, which opened participants’ eyes and left them fired up and inspired. Participants said they felt more deeply connected to others who saw the world’s pain, and were dedicated to making shifts towards beauty and wholeness.
So how did I find my purpose, in the end? It has always been in my soul, and my life has been a kind of treasure hunt to discover and craft how to bring it into physical reality.
Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
That is a great question. Being someone who has needed to create a highly out-of-the-box career, I had to learn tenacity and to “expect f*ckery”. I also inherently have a ton of passion. I feel like these three qualities have propelled me forward.
1. Tenacity. As an entrepreneur, you can’t just give up when it gets rough. You will get nowhere. How to develop it? Commit to it, and process your emotions along the way so that they don’t bog you down. Which brings me to #2:
2. Expect f*ckery. When I learned that things going wrong was literally part of the journey, it helped take the emotional sting out of problems. How to develop it? Practice.
3. Passion. I have an abundance of passion. It keeps me going, and it’s a large part of why I’m successful. People see that I am passionate about what they do and they are drawn to that. There’s so little passion in the world today! People feel so exhausted and beat down.
How can folks who want to work with you connect?
I am looking for people who feel like they are a cog in the corporate, colonized machine. Or perhaps they aren’t even aware of that, but something feels blah, flat, missing. I am seeking inspired souls who are ready to shake up their systems, but don’t know where to start. We’re not going to be able to topple the system. It’s too deeply entrenched. It’s time for us to return to the concentric circles and branches of community connection.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.laslobasdelcorazon.com
www.stephaniesmallhealth.com - Instagram: @laslobasdelcorazon
@kitchenwitchtherapist
