Unscripted Small Business Interview with Kinsey Morgan

Jeremy Rivera: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, host of the Unscripted Small Business podcast by Luxe Designs. I'm here with Kinsey Morgan, and we're going to talk about therapy. We're going to talk about her business, understand her approach to psychology, and understand her perspective. So Kinsey, what's your background and what brought you into your field?

Kinsey Morgan: That's a loaded question a little bit. I think we all have a little story or two of benefiting from therapy at some point in our life. Most people who get into this field have a reason for it.

So my reason probably started a long time ago in high school, seeking counseling for bullying and some family stuff that was going on at the time. It really was so impactful. The therapist I worked with was phenomenal and really worked with teens extremely well. There's a lot of sitting with teens, notoriously so. And so her work and our work together kind of catapulted me into this world of psychology.

Once I got to college, I fell in love with the subject matter. A lot of my professors actually had private practices as well as being professors at the university. So they talked from a first-person perspective on what they were learning, what their clients were coming in with, how best to help them. And they spoke with such passion about it that it really ignited a huge love for the subject and curiosity.

It's very unique in the way that we are all part of psychology, walking around in bodies every day. We are the subject matter. So we get to study ourselves and other people at the same time.

About Arise Counseling

Jeremy Rivera: Tell me about Arise Counseling. I believe that's—how new is that? How long have you been established? What's your approach? What do you want people to know about your counseling services?

Kinsey Morgan: So I started Arise Counseling about eight, maybe even nine years ago now, maybe only a couple of years out of graduate school. I was trying to get my hours and working in a lot of different roles at other places, at the same time as I was building Arise Counseling.

Throughout that time, I worked with an array of clientele, predominantly focused on trauma therapy. So EMDR is a very popular choice, but it's also my preference in working with trauma clients. I work heavily with mood disorders as well and in grief and loss.

Understanding EMDR Therapy

Jeremy Rivera: Tell me more about EMDR. What does that acronym stand for and what are some of the fundamentals that somebody coming in from the outside who may not be familiar with therapy—how exactly does that approach align with the needs of somebody who's been through a traumatic event?

Kinsey Morgan: So EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing. And to put it in more layman's terms and the way I describe it to clients: if you've ever—those of us who are parents have a child and we watch them sleep sometimes and their eye movements are going back and forth in REM sleep—that is their brain categorizing their day, logging things away into long-term memory, basically organizing everything.

And so what we aim to do with EMDR is with these traumatic memories, they get stuck. Normally they get stuck in the fight-or-flight part of our brain. And what happens with that is we then develop triggers that, for some people, impede their entire functioning in their day-to-day life.

So the aim and goal of EMDR is to basically recreate the bilateral stimulation of REM sleep while you're awake and remembering and recalling these memories. And in doing so, what we're wanting to do is we're wanting to turn down the brightness of the impact of those memories.

I also use an analogy of being outside of a movie theater and you're seeing all the movie posters. When you have a traumatic memory, your brain remembers a snapshot of that memory. Think about maybe the brightness of that movie poster—it's hurtful to look at it. Anytime you look at it or even go near it, it is a little bit blinding.

So think of EMDR as your dimmer switch to dim down the brightness of that memory so that we can look at it, examine it, walk ourselves through it emotionally and not have to live in it every day with the hurt and the pain impeding functioning.

Personal Experience and Brain Responses

Jeremy Rivera: That really makes sense. I went through counseling myself after being mugged and having gone through that, understanding how your brain functions. You have your amygdala and it has its basic functions. Though that fight, flight, freeze and appease—there's more than three. It's not just fight or flight. There's more behaviors that can stem out of that.

And they can start to apply to your relationships. You realize, "Hey, I'm having the same freeze response or going back to the memory when I'm in the middle of an argument that I had when I was mugged." You're like, "Those are—my brain has associated those two things. Maybe it's not good to associate my wife with being mugged." And maybe that's shutting me down from my higher-level reasoning and logic.

Kinsey Morgan: Yeah, and that's such a good example. And for most of us, if we really were to trace it even back further, we have a biological temperament that sometimes leans toward one or the other, or occasionally oscillates between both.

Most people find themselves in these moments where it's impacting their relationships and maybe even job satisfaction, how they relate to authority, and how they actually function in their day-to-day is significantly impacted. And for most of my clients, if you were to trace it back to childhood, we can see a pattern start to emerge.

Because what the brain does is it learns the quickest route. That's the whole design. It will start short-circuiting to the quickest route in order to keep us safe. And it does that because it's wanting to really protect itself. It's very self-protecting in that way. The brain will start to create new neural pathways and start associating things that even remotely look like it, sound like it, feel like it as basically being back in that memory.

Jeremy Rivera: Got it. So then the pathways that you're trying to build—you're having them re-explore those painful memories but in a different context so that you can create more pathways around it and disconnect those shortcuts, give a different context for that memory and associate it with something else or make it not as primary. That's basically the objective, right?

Kinsey Morgan: Basically, yes. And the beauty part about EMDR as well, as opposed to traditional talk therapy, is I have found traditional talk therapy, although very effective in its own right, it usually takes a longer amount of time. So I think of it like a corkscrew a little bit. You go forward and you go back a little bit and you go forward a little bit more and back a little bit.

With EMDR, I think of it more like a laser. It laser focuses on the unprocessed emotional ramifications of whatever memory someone is bringing up. I've had clients with all kinds of different types of trauma—work-related trauma, natural disasters, childhood trauma, sexual trauma, all kinds of things. But it works the same way. It's very interesting in that way, but it's like a laser pointer that goes directly to the beliefs and emotions that are attached to that memory.

Other Therapeutic Approaches

Jeremy Rivera: So tell me a little bit more about some of the other services or approaches you use in your therapy services. I know you said you work with a lot of trauma. What are some of the other channels or methodologies that you use in your practice?

Kinsey Morgan: So I use—most people are a little bit eclectic—but one of the things that I definitely use a lot of is CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy). That's a very common type of talk therapy. And the goal is to basically use your behaviors, thoughts, and emotions to process whatever you're going through. So that's one very evidence-based approach that I use.

And then also inner child work. So being able to do more somatic work and inner child work to start visualizing yourself. For some people, reparenting themselves, learning how to calm themselves, how to regulate, how to actually sit with their own emotions.

In our culture, especially in the US, we really love to intellectualize our way around things instead of feeling our way through something. And sometimes that pattern can keep people in therapy for a lot longer than they actually need to be.

So I do focus a little bit on EFT, Emotionally Focused Therapy, so that we actually get to the root cause of why these thoughts or behaviors are continuing to be a pattern. Talking our way around it usually keeps us in that loop as opposed to going through the pain or through the emotions that are actually a part of it.

Understanding Reparenting

Jeremy Rivera: That makes sense. So you said reparenting. Is that just in situations where you have an abusive parent or is that something where even somebody who has good parents, quote unquote—is it just for situations like "I was abandoned by one parent" or they went through trauma? Or is it something where just the rigors of existence lead us to this situation where we're supposed to be adults now? I'm 40 and I still turn around like, "Oh wait, I can't eat chicken pot pies all day. I guess I need to parent myself, make good choices, make good decisions."

Kinsey Morgan: I mean, don't get me wrong, you can use it for both. It's different levels, but it's the same mechanism, so to speak.

Some people, yes, they're needing to reparent from an abusive situation or reparent themselves because of an absent parent. But I've also found that a vast majority of people will come in and most of us, because of our own upbringings, we feel the need to defend our parents, especially if we feel like they're a good parent.

And it's this moment of: parents are still people. And therefore, because they're people, they can't always meet every single need. And we get messages from that that then carry over into adulthood.

The one thing that I have found that is very challenging for most people in the Gen X/millennial age range is that we had baby boomer parents. And their parents were usually very stoic—not always, but primarily they came from a generation that really does remember times when people, unfortunately, especially in the mental health space, those were not our finest years. And so they remember times when you really should not have talked about family stuff outside of the family because it could have literally been dangerous.

It's this moment of cultural generational trauma in a lot of ways because that meant that they didn't really get the ability to learn how to express their emotions as children. They really didn't get to learn how to regulate because everything was very shut down, stuffed down, and "let's avoid it."

And so then that in turn meant that they couldn't teach what they didn't know. So we now have a lot of studies about raising kids, where the parenting model has definitely changed and shifted for a lot of people. The ways that we would discipline has changed and shifted drastically.

And therefore, a lot of times what I'm actually doing is helping people in that middle bracket and sometimes even older bracket—I'm really helping them reparent themselves so that they can learn how to appropriately express, feel their way through, and actually come out on the other side in letting go of whatever is holding them back.

So to answer your question in a very roundabout way, it's both and. It's a both and, which is a lot of what I do, honestly.

New Trends in Mental Health

Jeremy Rivera: That makes sense. Is there a trend or something new in your field that you've found has been useful that's come out in the past few years? Something that—you've been doing this for at least 10 years. Is there anything new in terms of research or trends or insights that have come out that have really allowed you to unlock something or provide a different approach or spin on these therapy services?

Kinsey Morgan: Yeah, so one thing that really comes to mind for me is the somatic experience. And what I mean by that is emotions that we don't deal with, usually our body tends to take over.

They come out in different physical ailments and sometimes even in the health space, diseases and things later on in life. So for example, there are a lot of people dealing with a lot of autoimmune issues and there's definitely a link between people that struggle with opening up and expressing their emotions and actually getting that out of their body.

They sometimes have this trajectory where they end up later on in life developing different types of diseases, usually in the autoimmune space, because of shutting down those emotions and stuffing them down. Our body is extremely smart in that way and it takes that and it goes, "Okay, well, if you're not going to process this and get it out, then I am going to harbor it." It's the "body keeps the score" mentality.

Learn more about body awareness and emotional regulation through Kinsey's online resources, including guided meditation and progressive muscle relaxation exercises.

Cultural Acceptance of Therapy

Jeremy Rivera: That's fascinating. Having a cartoonified understanding of these things, I think culturally, how are you seeing the acceptance of needing therapy, of the stigma that you mentioned? Obviously in the '30s you could get lobotomized if you come forward with your emotional difficulties. We're very far from that, but we're also not—there's kind of a boomerang of maybe too far. So how are you seeing the current play out of culture, acceptance of therapy, tropes that are difficult that make work more difficult for you? What are your thoughts in that area?

Kinsey Morgan: Luckily, the culture is definitely shifting into more accepting of mental health and sometimes more accepting in the way of: we go to the gym for our physical exercise. We go to the doctor for our physical health. We go to the dentist for checkups. And I think some of the younger generation are saying, "Why don't we do that for mental health? It doesn't really make a whole lot of sense."

We're trying to cope with life all the time. So why wouldn't we have check-ins or moments where we come in and just process with someone? So that's a very promising thing to see because most of the older generations, there's definitely a lot of bias. I think most people are afraid and sometimes afraid of their own stuff and afraid to actually go towards the things that are scary. And that's a normal human thing.

But there's luckily a lot of shifting happening, but you're right, it's not quite as much as maybe we might think. We like to think we're very far away from what was going on back then. And in a lot of ways we are, but the stigma that is still there comes from a very long history of it not being safe for a long time.

Accessibility and Insurance Challenges

Jeremy Rivera: One other factor I wanted to bring up—my wife said she really believes that if mental health care, therapy, mental health services were 100% free for 100% of Americans, immediately accessible all of the time, then how much greater would our health and wellness be as a country? So I was wondering if you would address accessibility—being able to get in and work with an individual therapist like you. How do you handle that in your business? Handle clients' health insurance processes that can be confusing, onerous, paper trail nightmares at different times. How do you navigate that with your clients and how do you see that playing out on the national scale?

Kinsey Morgan: So many factors involved with that question for sure. The way that I handle it is I do not take any insurance, primarily because I don't have a team of people to be able to vouch for all of my clients and not enough hours in the day to do so as a one-woman show.

Most of the time agency work will take insurance. Not all agencies do. Sometimes they will offer sliding scale resources for people—I cannot tell you how important those are to the accessibility factor of mental health. I think any therapist you talk to is gonna want it to always be more accessible because that's definitely part of the obstacles that we face for sure.

And most people that are in the private sector like I am, we don't have the ability and the means to be able to vouch for all of the people that we see all the time. And I think sometimes people don't realize as well that when you're billing insurance, you are having to also diagnose. So in order to get reimbursed, it has to come with a diagnosis.

So if someone is, for example, coming in with grief over a loss, they might not 100% fit a depressive diagnosis because they're dealing with grief, they're not necessarily dealing with depression. So it's this moment of, "Where do I classify you if you don't meet all the criteria?" And I can't vouch for that if you don't meet all the criteria.

And then you get into this really weird space of, I don't want to label somebody with a label that's going to last in their history with their insurance company because occasionally that can be detrimental for them in a financial sense.

So the way that I usually handle it is on the initial phone call with anyone, I am very upfront about cost and then I'm advocating for them as well. So if their financial situation prohibits them from being able to see me, then I am very adamant and I feel it's my ethical duty to make sure to connect them with someone who can meet their financial need because that is—especially in this economy—so important. I want to make sure that everybody is connected with who they're supposed to be with for sure.

Primary Challenges Clients Face

Jeremy Rivera: What challenge that people are facing do you think that your services and therapies help the most with?

Kinsey Morgan: Most of my clients, it's functioning. Because they put off usually going to therapy until their functioning is inhibited. I've seen in the past couple of years a huge rise—and probably due to COVID and all of the ups and downs with occupational issues and shifts and things—honestly, a huge rise in workplace trauma.

And so from where I'm standing, a lot of the time it's these obstacles of: "I'm needing to be able to keep this job. I'm needing to be able to actually do what I'm hired to do. And I'm having trouble holding boundaries. I'm having trouble with work-life balance of any kind. And it's robbing me of my ability to have life satisfaction."

And so they feel usually like they're stuck between a rock and a hard place and they need a place to process that openly that they're not worried about any sort of pushback, to practice the skills that we talk about in therapy in a safe place so that when they go out into the world, they're able to then practice on what I consider to be a much harder audience.

Those of us in our personal lives, the people we love the most, supervisors at work—there's lots of different relationships that usually are needing to have a little bit of a shift, and that's usually why they're in my office in the first place. Therapy is a great training ground.

Workplace Trauma and Stress

Jeremy Rivera: That's actually something that I hadn't thought about, but it's true. We spend a lot of time, a large chunk of our lives in relationships with third-party people in high stress scenarios. I work with a lot of service businesses, like people doing pool installations, and that can be a demanding job for sure trying to get that “Just Right”. But I genuinely didn't occur to me that workplace pressures might be a good reason to go get therapy and that it might be a source of trauma and difficulty that you're dealing with. But now that your bring it up, work is… kind of a big part of our life.

Kinsey Morgan: It's a huge chunk. I think people don't think about that—the majority of the time that we spend throughout the week is at work. So if our work environment isn't a healthy environment and usually the worker is not the one in charge of the environment because there's a power differential—the individual is not in control—it's usually the company or whoever you're working for that's in charge of the environment and the worker is sort of like, if you wanted to look at it like a family, mom and dad are in charge of the home environment and the kids are the byproduct of whatever the environment at home is usually.

We spend the majority of our time there. And I think it's a very overlooked source of contention for a lot of people. With COVID, a lot of people working from home and then going back into the office or having a hybrid situation for the first time, people were really struggling with that shift. And we saw obviously a huge increase in clientele during that time.

But what people really didn't realize is that COVID also took away a lot of their coping. So the strategies that they would usually use for coping—going out with friends and connecting and going to a baseball game or a concert or whatever to be able to unwind—they no longer had those options.

And so now we're seeing people go back out into the workforce and be able to go out again, which is great, but we also have not been used to that for a couple of years. And so the stress that builds with that can halt people in their tracks. It really can, because it's definitely different going into an office versus being at home.

Jeremy Rivera: I think it's probably a lot safer talking to you than trying to talk to HR because HR is not there for you. They are there to protect the company. They are not looking out for your mental health and well-being, except for where the company might be monetarily liable for such. So Kinsey's a much better ally than Pam in HR.

Kinsey Morgan: Exactly. I couldn't agree more. I do have that conversation with a lot of people that have tried to reach out to their HR representative or have tried that route. And I think that's part of where the frustration comes from for a lot of people—they vocalized it or they felt like they have vocalized it to a supervisor or they've tried to vocalize it to HR, and then they have negative consequences that arise from that.

I think that's part of the huge frustration and why some people reach out to someone like me—to actually have that be safe and protected so that they can go over how they'd like to handle it and the emotions that come from the trauma response of it all. They can process it in a safe way so that when they are taking it to HR, if they want to, then it's this moment of: "I am regulated, I am able to stay regulated, I am able to communicate my needs effectively." And because I'm able to stay regulated in doing so, there's sometimes a better response to that.

Actionable Advice

Jeremy Rivera: So as we kind of wrap up here, I usually like to give a takeaway. If you had to condense mental health theory down to one digestible "go do this one thing to make yourself better"—but let's go ahead and say if there were something or a path to start down, what would you recommend as an actionable thing somebody could do after listening to this interview?

Kinsey Morgan: If only! I have found that with my clients it really comes down to asking yourself in actual introspection about what areas of life you might want to shift or change. If there's an area that you find that you do feel like, "Man, I'm just not very satisfied with this particular area."

I encourage people—obviously I'm very partial—but I encourage people to make sure to reach out to somebody to actually talk that through. Because most of the time there is at least one area of people's lives that if they were really honest with themselves, they'd want it shifted in some way. Whether it be:

  • "I'm wanting to really be able to express myself effectively"

  • "I'm wanting to increase intimacy in my marriage"

  • "I'm wanting to really work on my relationship with my children and making sure as they're aging and shifting into these new territories that I'm able to keep up"

There's so many different parts that really come into play. So I would say start with introspection, seeing if there's anything that you feel like you'd want to work on. And then it all starts with a phone call. And I will say that phone call is the hardest phone call that most people have to make. But on the other end of it is usually a therapist that is really ready and willing to work with somebody.

I definitely take it as a passion of mine. I come from a strength-based approach and really want my clients to know that they all have inherent strengths. We just have to find them and utilize them. So I think that would be where I would start for sure.

Individual vs. Couples Therapy

Jeremy Rivera: Just to get one last clarification, you mentioned relationships, but you mostly focus on individual therapy, one-on-one, and not necessarily couples or multi-person therapy, correct?

Kinsey Morgan: Correct. Yes, my specialty is individual therapy, but one of the things that I love about it is that most people will come in and they think that they're only working on what they bring to the table—and they are in a lot of ways. But if you change one part of the system, the whole system has to shift.

And I love that aspect because it's this moment of, "Okay, if something is breaking down, let's understand our own role in it. Let's be able to show up differently. See how that changes the system." If you're able to show up differently, if you're able to regulate yourself—if maybe your fights with a spouse, for example, have been escalated a lot of the time, or you're yelling back and forth or you're dysregulated—well, what could happen if your role in that shifted? Would that soften the interaction itself?

So yes, I work with individuals, but I also find that usually when they work on things that they have control over, it changes the whole system.

Jeremy Rivera: Sometimes it's also, "You know what, I changed this and it's still a major problem, so the problem is actually my boundaries are being violated." And so there are behaviors, whether that's mothers-in-law that are stepping over turf that doesn't belong to them, enmeshments, and integration in family. I'm sure in the South, there's absolutely nothing wrong with family issues that you're dealing with.

Kinsey Morgan: Of course not, of course not. Yeah, no, that's a great thing to notice as well because you're absolutely right. There's so many different factors to consider and sometimes it is boundary work. I work with boundaries all the time. And those are different with personal life, in-law relationships, and work-related boundaries. Yeah, boundaries are a big one for sure.

Contact Information

Jeremy Rivera: The boundary for us is the end of the episode. I'm going to make sure that your site is linked in the show notes. Anybody that's listening can find more information about you. Say clearly the name of your business again, where you're located, and some basic information about you so we can make sure people can connect.

Kinsey Morgan: So again, Kinsey Morgan, and I am the owner of Arise Counseling Services in Brentwood. And so if anyone is trying to locate us, we are at a therapy space in Brentwood.

Jeremy Rivera: Thank you so much for your time. Bye bye.

About Kinsey Morgan

Kinsey received her Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology from Harding University, and her Master's of Science degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from Lipscomb University. She is a Licensed Professional Counselor Mental Health Services Provider (LPC-MHSP) in the state of Tennessee and is trained in EMDR (level 1 & 2), TBRI, and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

She has a specific passion for helping individuals who help others, including those dealing with trauma due to careers in helping fields such as first responders, police officers, nurses, teachers, and other therapists.

Additional Resources

Kinsey Morgan