Making Meaning of Our Birth Stories

How do we make meaning from our birth stories? In our society, the experience of the birthing person is often overlooked. “At least the baby is healthy; that’s all that matters!” Not so. For both parents and babies, birth matters. The way we give birth deeply impacts how we become parents, the way we view ourselves, and the relationship we have to this particular baby being born.

It’s important to clarify that we can honor the depth of impact while also neutralizing the diverse paths babies take to get into our arms. There is no right or wrong way to birth. Birth can be surgical, medically induced, herbally induced, manually facilitated, physiologically undisturbed, and sometimes a combination of these. Birth can take place at home, in a hospital room, at a birth center, in an OR, or in an unplanned location like a car or waiting room. Birth can be supported by traditional midwives, a team of physicians and nurses, a certified nurse-midwife, a doula, a partner, or no one at all. Birth can make us very vocal and dramatic, highly externalizing, or can draw us inward, completely internalizing. Birth can take a very, very long time or a shockingly short amount of time. We all benefit when we view these variations as variations of normal—and all morally neutral. There is no right or wrong path and thus no way to fail in birth.

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Descending to the Darkest Part of the Year

We are invited to the adventure every year, come late October / early November. Sometimes it can be a graceful descent, and other times it's as if we are tumbling down, white knuckling the railing, grimacing and grumbling. No matter how many times we go through it and survive it, it can still be a bit scary!

What have you got in your toolbox? What helps you remember you have what it takes to endure the decay of late fall and winter? What helps remind you that you have light within you? What helps you allow and accept the dark parts, too?

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Now Offered at Conscious Practice: Ketamine Therapy

Blurry pink figure appears to be facing a black landscape background with purple and pink lights, a psychedelic impressions.

Ketamine is a powerful dissociative medication with psychedelic properties. Used medically in anesthesia since the 1960s, it is increasingly used in psychiatry at low doses to promote mental health.

There is growing evidence that ketamine is a safe, effective treatment for many states of mental unwellness, including depression, anxiety, PTSD, OCD, and other "stuck" mental patterns causing suffering.

When paired with a trusting therapeutic relationship, treatment with ketamine can be a powerful tool for people who want to explore non-ordinary states, make progress in their healing, and grow.

At Conscious Practice, ketamine assisted psychotherapy includes intake, preparation, medicine session(s), and integration support for appropriate clients.

There are a number of ways ketamine can be administered or taken into the body, including intravenous infusion (IV), intramuscular injection (IM), sinus cavity spray (intranasal), and under-the-tongue lozenge (sublingual). Conscious Practice will be offering ketamine medicine sessions using intramuscular injection or under-the-tongue lozenges. Each medicine route has pros and cons, leading to a qualitatively different experience. Like any potential medicine prescribed, dosing and route of administration is thoughtfully chosen based on each individual client’s health, needs, preferences, and overall treatment plan.

If you're interested in this modality, you’re welcome to request a free consultation with me. I'd love to hear what questions you have!

What Is A Psych NP? Differentiating From Doctors and Therapists.

Specializing in integrative psychiatry, holistic perinatal mental health, IFS-informed psychedelic therapy, and embodied trauma processing, by far the most frequently asked question I receive is: "Are you a doctor or a therapist or ????"

It is such an excellent question! I am not a medical doctor—I am an advanced practice nurse specializing in psychiatry and mental health. My license in Wisconsin is as an Advanced Practice Nurse Prescriber (APNP), and my national certification is Psychiatric-Mental Health Nurse Practitioner (PMHNP-BC). The “BC” indicates that I am “Board Certified,” which means I passed rigorous examination on psychiatry and mental health care and that I maintain all requirements to practice as a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner. The most important requirement, in my opinion, is to independently continue my education to stay up-to-date on my skills and current developments in neuroscience, advanced practice nursing, and psychiatry. It lights me up to learn and grow as a healing professional, integrating modern and ancient ways of being, relating, and discovering with clients.

Psychiatric mental health nurse practitioners — or psych NPs — have a broad skillset to treat mental illness and support people working to improve their mental wellbeing, including the ability to prescribe medication and offer psychotherapy, among other tools as research uncovers more effective interventions and modalities. We have a long history of centering relationships, analyzing systems, offering humanizing healing approaches, and promoting empowerment through patient education.

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What's All The Fuss About Ferments?

The bacteria that inhabit our gut are surprisingly vital to our brain functioning and mental health. Fermented vegetables, beans, grains, condiments, tea, and milk products are rich in microbes that support balance and optimal functioning in our central nervous system. Imbalance can be a root cause of anxiety and depression.

Maybe the relationship is not so surprising, though, when we look to our roots. Humans around the world have been eating fermented foods for millennia. Since our settlement patterns, agriculture practices, soil composition, food preparation skills, and diets have changed so drastically in the past couple hundred years, most of us (surely anyone reading this post) have been disconnected from our traditional sources of nourishment. This includes, fundamentally, fermented foods.

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What Is Bodily Autonomy in Psychiatry?

One of the most important aspects of my work at Conscious Practice is promoting bodily autonomy. This value underlies all my actions and interactions with clients.

Autonomy is the state of being free, self-directed, and independent in our choice and action. Rather than a right given to you by some outside entity, bodily autonomy is simply a truth acknowledged.

The truth is, you alone have power over your own body. This includes your freedom to choose what you do with your body, what you put into it, what words you use to describe it, how you choose to dress or decorate it, and so on.

Unfortunately, there are many institutions that violate this power we all have. From industrial waste polluting our land and water, commercial agriculture depleting minerals in the soil that grows our food, violent punishment for moving beyond a rigid gender binary, legislated restrictions on reproductive health choices, the medicalization of birth and death, and the intersections of psychiatry and incarceration, many forces limit our autonomy by limiting our choices in a real, material way.

This series will look at the way bodily autonomy can be threatened in the field of psychiatry. We will also explore antidotes to those threats and the intention, if it’s ever a need for you, that you will be empowered to seek mental health care that wholeheartedly affirms your autonomy.

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How Long Does Accelerated Resolution Therapy Take? (And How Is That Possible?)

Okay, Monica. With this resolution therapy you do: How "accelerated" are we really talking?

I'm asked this question a lot, and I get it! So I *finally* went back through all my charts and did the math.

For clients at Conscious Practice who decided to try Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART), they average 2-3 ART sessions total.

For the stats nerds 🤓…

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Wise Prescribing: A Balanced Approach to Psych Medications

At the beginning of my career, I worked at a large healthcare system, primarily in the outpatient behavioral health department with occasional weekend shifts on the inpatient psychiatric unit and at times doing psychiatric consults in the medical hospital. In the hiring process, I was assured I would be welcome and even celebrated for bringing a holistic approach to the department, integrating medicine, psychotherapy, mindfulness, and lifestyle counseling to facilitate patients’ healing. However, it quickly became clear to me on the job that I was hired and expected to simply prescribe medications (and avoid making waves). Administrators and therapists alike literally referred to me as “a prescriber,” a term I had honestly never heard of prior to being pigeonholed by it.

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What Does Trauma Processing Actually Mean?

“Let’s process this.”

“I haven’t really had time to process it.”

“You need to process what happened.”

The word “processing” gets thrown around a lot, but what does it actually mean? Processing means digesting and integrating information from experiences we’ve had–often focusing on painful, complicated, or traumatic experiences that were too much for our systems to cope with and integrate at the time.

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