We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Zoe Vlastos a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Zoe, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?
I feel my resilience as a golden light that starts in the center of my chest, at my beating heart, and spreads throughout my body. That sunshine light tells me I can get through anything and has a direct glowing line back to my childhood: the birth place of my resiliency. My childhood built my resilience not only because it was challenging but mostly because my childhood was so intimately in contact with the rawness of life. I mainly grew up unschooled/homeschooled on a rural farm in southern Illinois with three younger siblings, animals galore, a huge orchard and garden, and a 200-acre nature preserve abutting our property. My dad worked 100+ hour weeks in St. Louis as a specialized physician while my mom (a pediatrician by training) guided the farm and children toward growth. It was chaotic and beautiful, utterly imperfect and very alive: a true rootbed of resilience.
Facing the brutal reality of the life-death-life cycle so undeniably a part of farm life asked me from a young age to find that resilient light within myself. Whether it was my dad coming home from the hospital with stories of loss and pain, watching chicks peck out of the egg into wet-feathered first cheeps, finding our dogs soft fur – which I cried into for comfort at times- coated in blood because they had killed my beloved goats, or reveling in the magic of fireflies reflecting the stars on a summer night, I became intimately acquainted with the cycles of life and death. My resilience also strengthened as I navigated puberty as a young person who was both proud of and uncomfortable with not fitting in with the mainstream “school kids.” I learned to stand tall in my own beliefs and passions even if they were weird, wild, and went against the norm. Mostly I thrived, gaining maturity and a deep understanding of life’s raw harmony through exploring the wide open space of the woods, the freedom of self-directed learning, and the abundance of my creative inner world. My roots gained strength and dug deep with such abundant time to be with myself and my truth.
However, the roots were also tested as a teen because while I thrived in some ways I also was only surviving in others, developing an eating disorder in late high school in an attempt to cope with the unbearable emotions that came with some of the harsher realities I was facing. After struggling in a state of deep denial for over a year, my resiliency tree built its trunk by leaping fully and wholeheartedly into eating disorder recovery. Moving away from the perceived control and seductive false power of the disorder in order to come home to myself is one of the most uncomfortable thing I have done in my life. It’s also one of the things that I am most proud of and I wouldn’t change it for the world, because recovery has made me who I am today and continues to inspire my career daily. I am extremely passionate about celebrating and trusting bodies exactly as they are and learning to befriend our bodies as our homes. I love that I get to work with others who are on journeys away from eating disorders into a deep connection with their own aliveness.
Of course, the story of my resiliency has continued; like a tree that grows strong with each gust of wind, my inner-strength is enhanced with each new challenge life tosses my way. What I’ve learned is that returning to the light within myself gets me through every time.
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?
As a somatic and nature-based eating disorder therapist, I spend a lot of time supporting people in connecting back to their bodies. I believe that we all deserve to have a joyful relationship with the physical home we live within. I love getting to explore and heal the places where our relationships with our bodies have gotten clogged-up or painful. On my own journey I have found nature to be one of the most profound healers and supports, therefore I often incorporate nature into my sessions with clients. Even if we aren’t actually in nature, we can still use lessons, metaphors, and elements of nature to promote healing and growth while indoors. I see eating disorder recovery not only as an opportunity to reconnect with our bodies but also to recover our connection with our deepest and most authentic selves. I specialize in working with adolescents and young adults – simply because I love working with young people, who are so often misunderstood or dismissed in our culture.
Although I am extremely passionate about eating disorder recovery, I also love working with people navigating other mental health experiences. Whether it’s depression, anxiety, relationship concerns, trauma, body image, or self-esteem, I bring curiosity and acceptance to the places people are getting stuck on their paths to creating what they really want in their lives. I appreciate getting to meet people exactly where they are on their journeys, tailoring each session to individual needs by pulling from many modalities including EMDR, inner parts, emotion-focused, somatic, nature-based, and dialectical behavioral therapy. Sessions with me are very co-creative and focused on finding the wisdom within one’s own wise self.
There are lots of exciting things on the horizon for SolVida Psychotherapy including another SoulFire Backpacking Adventure next summer, a new Somatic & Nature-based Eating Disorder 12-session series, and a more consistent newsletter! In October I’ll be teaching an Awakening You course as Faculty at the Evolutionary Power Institute which is going to be transformative, informative, and tons of fun. As a vivacious and excitable person, one of my biggest challenges is directing my energy at a few things rather than everything all at once. Luckily, I have amazing colleagues and mentors who support me in staying on track so that I can truly bring my dreams to life!
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
TRUST – I am ALL about trust. Trust in oneself, in intuition, in the body, in being present with what is happening in the moment. I imagine trust like the flow of a river; although I don’t know where it will take me, I do know that it is going somewhere and that I’m committed to seeing where that is. Although I sometimes cannot tell where the flow of life is taking me, I’ve learned to trust that it all seems to work out in the end. Even if things feel dark, challenging, or unwanted in the moment, I try to trust that almost always there is something to learn from the experience and there is growth toward something beautiful that I just cannot see yet.
LOVE – my soul’s purpose is to love. I love deeply and fully, because for me it’s what makes the world a better place and brings me the most joy. Recently I’ve been focusing on choosing love and joy, even when things feel hard. Yes, feeling challenging emotions is extremely important, yet I try to not get stuck in dense emotional eddies when I could choose to create experiences of more love and joy once I move through the challenging emotions and listen for what they want to tell me. The love in my life is such a gift. In the world of psychotherapy I think it’s a bit taboo to say that we love our clients, but to me caring, offering positive regard, being empathetic and working with compassion are really the same flavor as loving. Why not choose to love more?
ADVENTURE – I see every interaction as an adventure! Of course, I adore outdoor adventures; I also love internal adventures. I see the work I do as a psychotherapist as getting to adventure through inner-landscapes with people. I don’t know all the details of each of my clients’ inner worlds but I do have a lot of experience exploring the inner topography of the human experience with curiosity, acceptance, and care. When we can see life as an adventure, I think it makes everything more doable!
Is there a particular challenge you are currently facing?
To be entirely honest, marketing is my biggest challenge right now. I truly believe that I’m good at my work and I love the work I do, however when I’m faced with “selling” my work to the world I get squirmy, a bit shy, and often awkward. I really want to be able to offer my services to the people who are yearning for them, yet I’m daunted by all the “marketing strategies” out there. It seems that every marketing expert has different advice, which can be overwhelming and confusing. I’m trying to see marketing as an adventure, experimenting with different strategies to see what feels like a good fit for who I am. Stay tuned, because I haven’t quite found my flow with marketing yet. Currently I am hopeful about offering a monthly newsletter because I love to write and I think sharing my thoughts on navigating our human existence will be supportive and also fun! Overall, I’m trying to anchor into trust that the people who are meant to work with me will find me.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://solvidatherapy.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zoevlastos/
Image Credits
Elizabeth Woods-Darby & Teya Rose Media
so if you or someone you know deserves recognition please let us know here.
