Aug 20, 2020
This episode is all about trauma in career development and the
workplace. Alyssa and special guest, Valerie Hicks Ashley, M.S.,
dive into a discussion on how one's history of trauma can impact a
multitude of work-related events. For example, did you know that
job interviews can be a major trigger for most trauma survivors? Go
check out the awesome work Valerie is doing at www.valerieashleycounseling.com
Resources:
How to Answer the 64 Toughest Interview Questions
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Transcript:
Alyssa Scolari: [00:00:23] Hey everybody. Welcome to episode two of the Light After Trauma podcast. I'm your host Alyssa Scolari. And this episode is a super special one for me because it's the first episode in which we have another trauma warrior on air with us. She has taken a lot of the dark times in her life and she has found light in them.
So today I'm going to be speaking with Valerie Ashley, who has been working with trauma survivors of all types for over 20 years. Valerie has her master's degree in community and trauma counseling from Thomas Jefferson university. She also has certifications in domestic violence and sexual abuse and of particular interest to Valerie is how trauma affects us in the workplace.
And this is something that really doesn't get a lot of light shed on it. But it's so important when it comes to being a trauma survivor and trying to figure out how to manage the workplace. Our careers take up, I'd say the majority of our lives at some points. Valerie is coming on the show today to talk to us a little bit more about that and how we can manage being trauma survivors in the workplace.
And with that being said, I am going to turn it over to you, Valerie. So hello, how are you?
Valerie Ashley: [00:02:16] I'm great. How are you today Alyssa?
Alyssa Scolari: [00:02:19] I am good. Thank you. Do you want to just tell the listeners a little bit more about yourself? Expand on what I said a little bit.
Valerie Ashley: [00:02:27] Sure. As you said, I've been practicing for more than 20 years with a specialty in what I call trauma informed career development counseling.
So that's a big title, but what I mean by that is that I have over the years that I've worked, realized that people's trauma affects their ability to create a sustainable healthy work life. And so I really worked on pairing that to where it begins and then helping people to make the connections between their trauma, so where their trauma begins and where their difficulties are then in their work-life and piecing those together to be able to get through even just the idea that they have any kind of professional identity, then how do you go through a job search? Because job searches are particularly triggering for people. And then how do you get into a workplace and handle all of the workplace dynamics? Like things like office politics, which requires someone to be able to really grasp the subtleties of a human interaction. And when you are a trauma survivor, oftentimes those are things that you don't really learn or you're actually, I would say, even your brain and your nervous system can't really take it. So that's the gist of what I do. I work with people individually right now.
I'm working virtually completely virtually, but when all of this is over. We'll see. But I used to work in person and I think that if anybody is saying to themselves, what's wrong with me, why can't I have a job I can live off of and take care of my family with or take care of myself with or from I think that this is the kind of thing that might help them make sense of that.
Alyssa Scolari: [00:04:37] Absolutely. And I think that, as trauma survivors, the majority of us require treatment, but treatment costs money. To have money, we need to be able to hold down a job and to hold down a job, we have to be able to manage our trauma. So it's like this vicious cycle.
And it's. So many bosses I have, I've had supervisors and bosses in the past that have said, leave your trauma at the door or not leave your trauma at the door per se, but leave your issues at the door when you come into work.
But when you are a survivor of developmental trauma, trauma in your childhood, your brain literally has not formed to be able to leave your baggage, quote, unquote at the door.
Valerie Ashley: [00:05:35] So I completely agree with you about this idea of leave your trauma. I would say, even leave your feelings at the door, don't bring in any of who you are fundamentally as a person that just.
I just have never in my entire adult life understood that because who we are, doesn't stop when we go into work. And what else, what I want to say about that too, is that the other thing I find really interesting is why it is that there are so many competent, wonderful trauma therapists out there who help people integrate themselves by processing their trauma, but they end treatment right before or right when they hit work life. And I think that's like this huge piece that's missing for people in trauma treatment. So I think that's one of the questions that I have is why are we not talking about how trauma impacts someone's work life?
And I think also the other thing I want to say about leaving your feelings at the door is that when you are a trauma survivor, one of the things like it's a weird way to say this, but you actually, there's a kind of a gift that comes out of it. And that is having an incredible sixth sense about people.
You learn to have a sixth sense because it's part of survival in our world. They call that being hypervigilant. But in this case, to me, vigilance. Could be something that can really benefit you when you're going through an interview process or when you're learning to work with people because you've got a job.
So leaving your feelings at the door is the worst thing I think a person could do, especially someone who's been exposed to trauma. And has that kind of experience.
Alyssa Scolari: [00:07:31] Absolutely. It's almost in therapy, we as therapists, we work on what's called integration. And how can anybody be expected...
it's like you have to integrate as a trauma survivor, but then you go onto the workplace and. Forget about it all. You're a robot. Not assuming it doesn't work like that. It actually encourages dissociation.
Valerie Ashley: [00:07:57] Exactly. Yeah. And I think that for complete integration through trauma processing, this piece of work has to be done.
And I still question why no, one's really looking at how to do that. And also dissociation is definitely something that is encouraged by that idea that you're just going to leave everything at the door. You need to bring all those feelings in so you can manage how you're feeling and not actually dissociate either in an interview or when you're actually working.
Cause things will trigger you on the job. So maybe that's something we could just talk about a little bit, maybe what we could do is start by just talking about how people, why the job search for most trauma survivors is so triggering. Would that be okay?
Alyssa Scolari: [00:08:48] Yeah, absolutely. That is one of the things I wanted to ask is like more specifically and more concretely, what are some of the issues that you found that come up for people?
Valerie Ashley: [00:09:00] So I, like I said earlier, I've taken my thought process back to the very beginning. So the very beginning is first understanding what someone's trauma is. And most people who come to me have done some of that work, but not all of them. So if there's still more, that needs to be done around processing their trauma. That's something that we can do, but then what we really need to look at that point is who are you? What are you looking for? Do you even have a notion about what kind of work do you want to do or how you see yourself fitting into professional life?
And I would argue that a lot of trauma survivors do not have that because. That process takes place when you're young, generally speaking. So a child, my idea is that a child as they develop, they get access or they get exposed to jobs and professions through their parents, friends, through their clergy, through their community, their teachers, their neighbors.
And if you absorbed that you absorbed, like you might see a fireman on a fire truck and say, Hey, what is that guy doing? Or that truck's really cool. I want to drive that. And maybe your parents take you to visit a fire house. And so you get some exposure and let's say you meet a teacher that is you particularly gel with and you think, wow, I would like to be her.
So these are the ways that children begin to develop their ideas about who they are or who they want to be. And as you grow older, and I would say you get into high school, those what I call vague notions about the things that are of interest to you probably have been pared down a bit.
And maybe what you find out from your schooling is that you're particularly drawn to art classes, let's say, and you're really talented in that arena. And you are either going to come out with an idea of a notion about a focus for a job search, or you're going to come out with an idea of focus for a concentration at college.
It depends on what direction you're going in and that sort of where you grow from then and develop a work-life. What I say is that when you are living in a traumatized situation. You're in a home where there's chaos, where there's abuse. You live in a neighborhood, where there's crime or you go to school and you work with teachers who they themselves are, trauma survivors, that chances of you being able to develop that are very little because your nervous system is so heightened and so on alert all the time.
That's what you're focused on. So what my work does is it actually allows people to go back and recreate that process. So that they're able to start to say, Oh yeah, I remember being interested in this or, I've always really admired people who did that. And then once you have that, then you can start to actually create a focus again, either for going to school or for a job search.
So let me just stop there. Does that make sense?
Alyssa Scolari: [00:12:24] Yeah, it does. So basically what I hear you saying, and one of the main goals of your work is to help people to break down their trauma defenses so that they can see who they really are and what path they really want to take in life.
Valerie Ashley: [00:12:42] Yeah. I think that's a perfect way to say it, breaking down their trauma defenses, or I would also say maybe we're saying the same kind of thing, but also just connect their reactivity, let's say to something that they have to do in order to get a job. So let me just, I want to just say a little bit about that. So let's just think about asking a trauma survivor to write their resume. And this happened to me, this is how I started to figure this out and the client wouldn't do it and I didn't understand why they wouldn't do it.
And at first, my reaction was, oh, there, being obstinate, not just resistant, but obstinate. And then I realized that the reason that they didn't want to do it was because writing a resume requires you to look at your history and to think about your history. And that's probably one of the last things that trauma survivors want to do.
So you can see how, what you're talking about breaking down your resume, your trauma barriers is involved right here in actually doing a job search. Does that make sense?
Alyssa Scolari: [00:13:54] Yeah it's honestly mind blowing to me because it's one of those things that you would think would be so simple, but you're right.
Valerie Ashley: [00:14:03] Asking somebody to write a resume is asking somebody to reflect back on their history. And I would imagine that the same difficulties arise even in an interview process. So let's say trauma survivors land an interview. How do you think that interview process affects people?
Let me just first, before I go on to that, and I will just say with respect to the resume, not only are you asked to reflect on your history, but you're also asked to say what you're good at doing.
I'd say and most people have who have this kind of exposure or any kind of trauma exposure really don't know what they're good at doing. So that becomes another trigger. Oh God, I don't know what I'm good at doing. So how am I supposed to write this? But your other question regarding interviewing is really critical, because let's just think about when we go into an interview and someone says Alyssa, tell me about yourself. I can almost guarantee you that a trauma survivor without this kind of intervention from trauma informed career development counseling is gonna just have like their brain explode because they don't know what to say.
The first thing they might think of is I'm a trauma survivor. Cause there is that in their identity, but you can't say no, you can't say that in an interview. So that's where dissociation can occur. And I've seen, clients I've known of them. They go in, they dissociate and they cannot remember anything about what they're trying to say.
And I would argue that a lot of people who have that dissociation happened to them should consider, is there trauma affecting them in that particular way? And then the second question that you might be asked is, so why should I hire you over somebody with the same credentials?
Alyssa Scolari: [00:16:02] Oh, just listening to that gives me butterflies in my stomach. I can't even imagine.
Valerie Ashley: [00:16:08] Think about it. If your whole life you've felt as if you're less than you're worthless, you don't amount to anything, you don't get things, you're still the shame. Asking you that question again is just is mindblowing. And so what the trauma-informed career development counseling does is it helps someone to recognize that connection and then to learn how to talk about themselves. So you, so now you have a resume that really for people when they see a resume and what I usually do is write it for them so that they can see themselves in black and white, and they can use that resume then as guideline for how they want to talk about themselves. So there's a lot of processing there goes on there in order for someone to be able to be even successful in an interview.
Alyssa Scolari: [00:17:03] Wow ! OKay. So let me ask you this. What advice would you give somebody? So let's say some of our lists owners out there are struggling. They have a therapist and they have this sort of rift or separation wherein they go to work and then they go to therapy. But. They're triggered and work, but they never really bring that into the therapy session.
What advice might you give somebody who's struggling with that? Because I think that as trauma survivors, we've all, even once we get to the point where we do become employed and we do get a job, I know personally I can recall countless times being so triggered by people who I worked with, people in authoritative positions.
And I wouldn't understand why, but I didn't even know enough to be able to bring it to my therapist and talk to her about it. Does that make sense?
Valerie Ashley: [00:18:06] It does. I think it's a really good question. So what I would advise someone to do is to work with someone who is familiar with how trauma affects you on the job.
I mean I'm a therapist. So I would work with somebody to understand relationally what's happening between them and another person. But I'm also going to be able to look at, so what's happening here between you and this person in relationship to your trauma. So an example is: I have found over the years of doing this work an uncanny, granted anecdotal connection, between trauma survivors and picking abusive bosses or picking up spouses that, I've had them where you're like, what is happening here?
I can't, this person doesn't treat me well. I don't understand what their directions are. They're making me feel like scattered and chaotic. And I don't know why. And I think the tendency is for us to blame ourselves. That's the first thing to say that there's something wrong with us. When in fact there may well be something that, maybe you working for a boss who's just abusive.
Who's had their own trauma and it was 70% of Americans experiencing at least one trauma. You're bound to be running into people who you're working for who've had trauma. What I'm going to go back and further and say, the thing to do is to look at, in my opinion, the thing to do is to look at how you came to have that job with that person.
What are the kind of questions that you asked? What were you feeling when you were in the interview? Because as I said earlier, this six sense that I think trauma survivors have in this situation is a real gift. Because it allows us to pick up on those feelings, but if we're not paying attention to the feelings, then we won't pick up on it.
So I just think that it's really important to make sure that the interview process is one where you're very tuned in. And if you are in a situation with like that with a boss that is making you crazy or a work situation, that's making you crazy pay attention to it and know that you can change your job, that you're not stuck.
That this isn't the only place that you can work, which I think is another kind of symptom if you will, of having lived with trauma. Is this feeling right? You're trapped and you're helpless and you're not. So there's this very circular thing that goes on with people who have trauma from the beginning stages to being on the job, to being in a situation where maybe you have to change your job. So knowing how to go through a job search without all the triggers is part of what opens you up to new opportunities.
Alyssa Scolari: [00:21:19] Yeah. And part of I love the way you put it in it, it makes me smile.
Actually, when I hear you say it, when you talk about us having a sixth sense and embracing it I just think that I've never heard it put that way before. And I think that it's such an empowering way to put it. It makes us feel empowered, like having a sixth sense. That's so true.
Valerie Ashley: [00:21:46] And it is empowering and I think there's so much that trauma survivors go through when to heal and to become integrated. And this is one of those pieces of the trauma experience that is a strength. And I'm all about what are your strengths? What do you know how to do let's give voice to that part of you that sort of has been squashed.
And the sixth sense is something that I see repeatedly over and over again. And that's why I'm so confident saying it. So it is, it's a real strength, I think.
Alyssa Scolari: [00:22:27] Yeah, it is. And I love hearing you put it that way. I just think that this topic is so important and it's not given nearly enough attention. And I'm wondering, how did you come to develop such a passion for this specific area?
Valerie Ashley: [00:22:50] That's a great question I have for my whole entire work life, been in career development in one form or fashion, and actually I fell into it like a lot of people do. I come from a family of therapists and at the time I did not want to be a therapist.
I was not interested. But I was really interested in and good with people. And I was really interested in that intersection between psychology and business psychology and works/ work life. I just think I started, I studied psychology and I started to think about that a lot. And so I had a job and my job was as a manager director of a career development center.
And part of my job was to interview the students. I call them kids, but they, I think I was actually pretty close to the same age, but at any rate. So I started to realize that in those interviews that some people had personal histories that affected them. So the trigger for this whole thing was talking to a student who was interested in the law, had really good grades in the graduate program I worked in, but his grades from his university, which was a really good university, were not on par with what he needed to have litigation firms really look at him. And I, it just, something just didn't add up. So I asked him this question, which I now ask all the time, what's the most difficult thing you've ever had to deal with in your life to date. And he said to me, when my mother died suddenly during my junior year of college, And the light bulb went on and I thought, Oh, okay. That's what happened. No wonder his grades plummeted, but it gave me the tools then to be able to say to him, so this is what you, how you have to talk about this when you go into a litigation firm or write about it or in a cover letter or at any rate, bring it up because it'll make the picture make sense.
And that's from there, I just took off and I said, part of what we're doing is we're not asking people the right questions, it's interesting. And career development, career counseling, vocational psychology, whatever term you want to use for it. One of the things that really happened about a hundred years ago, is that who you are as a person and what you do for your work started to be separated out. So therapists did one piece of the work, career counselors did another, and then it started to come back together a bit, but it's still, in my opinion, if you look at all the theories over the past 100 years, they're amazing theories.
But one thing they don't include is any discussion of trauma history. And as soon as you add trauma history into career development, all of those theories have gaps. When this student said this to me, I just thought, Oh, these are the kinds of questions that we need to be asking as career development specialists, but also we need to be willing to integrate, to think about a whole person and not just work they do, because what work they do is completely affected by, or don't do is completely affected by their emotional life and their personal history. So that's how this launch
Alyssa Scolari: [00:26:24] Absolutely. It is so true. It's so true. And I think back to being in graduate school and having my career counseling class, and I remember that class very specifically because it was late at night and my teacher was so boring.
I apologize if you're listening out there, but it was a terrible class and we never once talked about trauma and how that impacts the work environment and your career development. Never once was it brought up and looking back on it, it's Oh duh, like what, why weren't we thinking?
Valerie Ashley: [00:27:07] Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. And I was in a graduate program that was strictly trauma. Every class was about trauma, but in a different, in the trauma of the family trauma, the neurobiology of trauma and the career development class, I can't say it was a void of that topic because it was a trauma program, a graduate program, but there wasn't a lot to go on to talk about it. My understanding of the career development classes is that it's really structured around passing the LPC or the exams, because there's a lot of information on those board exams licensing exams that you have to know in order to do it. But it's I just think about it and I think, gosh, we're just missing an entire piece of a person's life.
And actually rather a large piece of their life. If you think about how many hours a day we spend working, and then how many years would we work? That's a lot of the person's life. So I'm on a mission to get the word out about this, because this is something that we need to be talking about and we need to be creating curriculum around and that sort of thing.
Alyssa Scolari: [00:28:29] Absolutely. And I, one of the things I wanted to ask you is that, so your master's degree is specifically in trauma, and I know you said earlier, you come from a family full of therapists and you had no interest in being a therapist. How did you get on this path of having a passion for trauma ?
Valerie Ashley: [00:28:53] That's a great question. So a lot of, yeah, other therapists and especially people study trauma. I had my own, I grew up in a family where my parents were both foreigners. My mother was French and she grew up in Paris during the Nazi occupation and she and her family most of her family survived, but what I, the way I describe it is it's like it's growing up in a family with a depression of the soul. And when somebody goes through what my mother went through, it's trauma on so many different levels. And I think it's I'm a big believer in it's seeping into you through your DNA.
And I never really understood because my mother would not talk about what her experience was and we weren't raised as Jews. So I was never around anybody. You had that experience. I think I told you I was actually raised as a Quaker, which I think is really ironic given the silence the way that Quakers worship is a silence and there was silence all around the issues that my mom grew up with. And then my father was British and he grew up during the war in London and suffered terribly a lot of trauma there. So there was that in my family. And so I grew up that way. And then I, myself was in a really bad accident when I was 19.
And I think that actually started me on a path of trying to understand. It was trauma on trauma and maybe if, my siblings didn't have that and maybe they were able to navigate the trauma in a different way, but I couldn't, it was, so it was such a bad accident that it forced me to go into therapy and I still didn't want to be a therapist, but I was always just scared in that way, because my mother's a therapist. My sister's a therapist, my brother-in-law was a psychiatrist. It was just around me. And it just was normal to me that people went into therapy, but and that therapy was beneficial, but I think that being, so I spent a lot of time at career development, but being a therapist per se, really like I made that decision a few years ago when I was in Paris with my son.
And I visited the grave of my ancestors who are buried in a very prominent Catholic cemeteryPère Lachaise in Paris. And there were, they were Jews. And I could see that they were all Jews because of their names and because of the Jewish star, because there was Hebrew written on their gravestone and it really struck me.
And I think because I grew up in America, I really didn't have access to that. Or it just struck me. I was like, Oh my God, I'm the great granddaughter and great-granddaughter and niece, to all of these people who were survivors. Either of the Holocaust or the first world war, it just was so clear to me.
It was something that I had to do that I needed to expand and really help people process their trauma because I feel incredibly fortunate that I've been able to do that. And it's a hard process and it's not fun for people to do at all. But I think that it's lifesaving and I think that you can overcome your trauma and there are people out there who can help you to do it, and you can overcome it in every aspect of your life.
Alyssa Scolari: [00:32:42] Absolutely people can recover and I think recovery looks different for everybody. And I personally believe recovery is a lifelong process.
Valerie Ashley: [00:32:53] Right.
Alyssa Scolari: [00:32:54] And I don't think. I don't think you're always suffering. And I think a lot of trauma survivors are suffering, but there is absolutely hope. And you can absolutely get to this point where you move from being in the suffering to owning your pain and integrating like we've talked about.
And again, that process looks different for everybody. What would you say is one of the biggest contributing factors to your personal healing.
Valerie Ashley: [00:33:34] I just wanted to go back and just add onto something that you were just saying, and that is not only can you not, can you live, enjoy but the fact that you survived, these, this trauma, whatever the trauma is, makes you an incredibly unique interesting powerful person, because I feel like I found a voice, my voice in all of this. And so I just wanted to say that I don't think this being a trauma survivor is there are some things about it that make you who you are, and it's very unlike other people. And I value that a lot. I no longer look back and say, geez, I wish I had other parents.
I'm so grateful for the parents I had. I'm so grateful for what they taught me. I don't know. The way that they educated me. So just let me come back to your question though. I think the, one of the biggest was working with a therapist who did EMDR. And yeah, and I started to do that.
I was triggered by something. I can't, it doesn't even make sense. It doesn't make sense what it was it's so it's irrelevant, but it was right around my birthday and my mom, who was alive and she said to me, this is the trauma from your accident. See, this is what it's like to have a parent who's a therapist. And I was like, what? And she said, I'm telling you, this is the trauma from your accident. And something triggered you and you need to go see somebody who does this. So my mother did EMDR on everything having to do with her own trauma. And it was a miracle how much it changed my mom, because before that, and I love my mother dearly and I'm really glad she was my mom.
But before that, it was a struggle for her when there were four of us and I'm the youngest, but it was hard for her when, for us to be needy. Cause I think she was so needy herself. And anyway, she was this very brave woman who constantly reinvented herself. And so at around age 70, she started to see this EMDR therapist and she became the mom that I always wanted.
And the reason that she was like that is because she could share herself in a way that she never did before she like really grew peaceful in her own self. And she was more available because of that to me. And so when she said that to me, I was like, okay, I honestly, and even to this day, I still don't really understand, but I started that work with an EMDR professional named Michael de Antonio who's in the Philadelphia area who I think.
I remember after starting it, that my husband said to me, Oh, this is the new improved Valerie. I just, it was very subtle, but it was like, I had so much anger that it sorta came out sideways sometimes, and that just dissipated. It actually went away. And I remember my sister saying to me it feels like the Valerie that we knew when you were younger before this accident has returned.
And that's what I felt like energetic and not angry and able to think. And it was just been an amazing process. And I highly recommend that for anybody. Like I felt, like I said, all I could say, I didn't know what else to say anymore. And EMDR helped me to look at how it was connected to my body and my brain.
But not just through talking and thoughts if you will, so that to me has been the most healing work I've done. And, I would say one other thing is having children and I was, it was very healing to have children and to be able to raise them in the manner I had wanted to be raised. And again, that's not to put down my parents because I love them dearly, but I can see ways in which this, I felt like, okay, I'm taking up this mantle and moving it into this generation and I can do better.
I should do better. I'm called on to do better as a parent. And I think being responsible that way for your, Oh, as soon as you have children, you have to start thinking about how you're affecting them. And I wanted to be really careful and sure that I wasn't effecting them in a deleterious way.
Alyssa Scolari: [00:38:44] Absolutely because you realize that trauma can be passed down through the generations.
Valerie Ashley: [00:38:50] Yeah, and my kids knew my mom, my mother just died actually this time last year, I think, my kids knew her and we weren't silent about everything. We talked about it and so it was out in the open. And so anyway, that's the other thing that I think really helped me.
Alyssa Scolari: [00:39:10] That's incredible. That's incredible. The work that you do is incredible. Your journey to this career for you is incredible right now. What does the work that you're doing right now consist of?
Valerie Ashley: [00:39:27] I work as a trauma therapist and I do have this specialty and I really want to, I'm willing to work with people who have trauma period.
I'm especially interested in working with people who are recognizing that their trauma is affecting them in their work life, or maybe just not even realizing that, but having trouble with their work life. I also wanted to go back to something we talked about at the very beginning, which is I recognize that there is a whole circular problem with trauma survivor under earning, being underemployed, not having the money to see a therapist and so on and so forth. And one of the things that I'm doing right now, especially because of the horrible trauma that's happened to people because of COVID. Losing their jobs, unceremoniously, not knowing what to do now.
And that's something that I think is actually like another conversation, but not knowing what to do and being really frightened. And if you're already a trauma survivor, this is expecially, especially triggering. And so at any rate, what I was going to say is that I have a sliding scale for people who are having a need, a financial need, and I'm really willing to discuss that with people.
And I would do work individually and I also work, as I said earlier over virtually right now, because I don't think it's safe to be in an office together. So does that answer your question?
Alyssa Scolari: [00:41:07] Absolutely. So if people are interested in learning more about you and the awesome things that you are doing, they can head over to your website, which is valerieashleycounseling.com.
Valerie Ashley: [00:41:21] And yep. And there's a contact page there, but you can also read about what I do and read more about it and read about my credentialing. I wanted to add one other thing. I'm also really open to training, so I've done trainings for therapists, especially therapists who works with domestic violence survivors, because that's another conversation too.
There's a whole host of issues around worklife for domestic violence survivors, but I'm really interested in training other therapists on how to use this work or how to recognize it when it's coming up with your clients. So that's another avenue that people might want to use me for.
Alyssa Scolari: [00:42:06] Awesome. And I will make sure that Valerie's website will be listed on the show notes when this episode airs. So you guys can just check out the show notes and go look at her website and learn more about her. And I think that's, it. I'm so happy you were able to come on today. I feel like we could have a million conversations about a million different topics, but I really appreciate you coming on today.
Valerie Ashley: [00:42:35] My pleasure really, it's been wonderful to talk with you and you're a great trauma therapist and I love the way you think about things. And yeah. Yeah. So thanks for having me.
Alyssa Scolari: [00:42:48] Thanks for listening everyone for more information about today's episode and to sign up for the light after trauma newsletter, head over to my website at alyssscolari.com.
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