Mental Health and ADHD

Do you enjoy your job? I love my job. I’ve been trained as a mental health therapist since 1995, and have been with the private practice I’m with …

Mental Health and ADHD

Mental Health and ADHD

Do you enjoy your job?

I love my job.

I’ve been trained as a mental health therapist since 1995, and have been with the private practice I’m with since 2020. I did a lot of non-profit work between ‘95 and 2018, and enjoyed lots of pieces of that as well.

It has always been important to me to make a difference.

Currently, I’m specializing in working with people who have ADHD, depression, and anxiety. I particularly specialize in ADHD.

My undergrad was a BS in Psychology, where I learned all about the brain. Then I went straight to get my MA in Community Counseling at the University of Cincinnati, where I found my niche of working as a mental health therapist.

I love lots of pieces of my job. I love to read, and really enjoy reading research based works and learning about evidence-based practices. Currently, I’m reading a book to help me work better with children who have ADHD and can struggle with following rules. It is called ‘Your Defiant Child’, and while I’m not a huge fan of the title, the information is very much strength-based.

At my last full time non-profit employer, I was frequently told by my boss and the president of the company that I reminded them of an outpatient therapist. This was interesting to me, because although I had provided therapy in many settings, being an outpatient therapist was something that my job title had only briefly included.

My history was in home-based therapy, where I was able to see the entire family system. When I was at Promising Futures, I provided outpatient therapy toward the end of our time as a stand-alone non-profit before we merged with the Children’s Bureau.

Today, I am working on my writing skills, which my job allows me to do with the schedule that I have. I have seen clients this morning, will participate in a consultation training at 1pm, and then will see clients until late afternoon.

I have a one hour break in there where I will either continue working on my writing skills, or read more of my book.

It’s a job I love, and I’m so proud to be a part of a group practice that has multiple locations to serve the North Dallas area.

What do you like about your job? Are there pieces of the schedule that you like, do you like being retired from a job you may or may not have loved, or are there more things you dislike about your job than things you like?

Either way, I hope you are able to enjoy your day today and tomorrow as well.

Pilates

What are your favorite physical activities or exercises?

So when I was little I really wanted to be a gymnast.

I watched gymnastics on tv, I endlessly practiced doing a handstand unsuccessfully, and I successfully practiced headstands.

Fast forward to the summer before my 50th year, and I moved to Texas. My childhood friend was a Pilates instructor, and I had learned about a condition known as Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, better known as EDS.

I began doing Pilates. Pilates works the core, and in many ways is like doing gymnastics or dancing on your back.

I realized that with my ligaments being unable to keep things like my shoulders in place, and my abdominal muscles being very weak from having a hysterectomy in 2018, that Pilates provided a lot of help.

I learned, through a trauma training I participated in, that movement and talk therapy work together to help us function as well as we can. I find the meditative aspect of Pilates helpful. Like many therapy sessions, a pilates class is 50 minutes long.

Core strength helps with back pain. We do a lot of footwork, which helps with ankles which tend to turn easily. The work we do in Pilates supports the mental health therapy we can get by helping our bodies stay in tune.

I recommend Pilates to many people in my personal life. My niece and my sister have started doing it as well.

As you think about what helps you to function as well as you can, what do you think about?

What are your favorite exercises that you like to do?

When you think about the mind-body connection, what helps you to calm down, relax, and exercise your muscles?

I encourage all of us to find some way of moving our bodies. That may be aerobic exercise, running, pilates, yoga, or many other things. As we end this year and get close to the holidays, what are you thinking about to help yourself to get or stay physically fit?

I hope your holidays are as peaceful as possible. I will be home in Texas on Christmas for the first time this year, and am looking forward to spending time with my family.

Changing and Staying the Same

What is one thing you would change about yourself?

Today’s prompt is the question you see above; what is one thing you would change about yourself.

My immediate thought was that i would change my flexible joints. They are a part of who I am, and enable me to squish my hand into a tiny fist, but also cause quite a bit of pain.

Today though, I’m thinking about anxiety.

My imagination works quite well, and with that comes a fair amount of anxiety. I would lessen my anxiety, although it has helped me to have success in school and work.

This weekend, we are heading to Indianapolis to celebrate my son’s graduation from law school. This has taken a bit longer than anticipated, due to an illness he had during fall semester of last year.

You have a few goals when you have kids, and one of them is to launch them.

I went to grad school immediately following undergrad as well. We were ridiculously poor, and the future income of a mental health therapist is not as high as I would have liked for it to be.

We knew, as I was accumulating loans, that paying them back was going to be tough. My husband was in retail at that time, which was not a high paying role for him. I studied, worked at a group home for boys, and spent a lot of time entertaining myself with very little income.

He worked approximately 70 hours per week. He was an assistant manager at a Footlocker, which was similar to Finish Line. He taught me about multiple sales, and I taught him about some of the traumas that the boys had experienced where I worked.

We have been together since we were 20/21 (me being the older one), and have been with each other all of that time. We worked together through our poverty, and have lived through more than one recession.

Our children were born on the same day, but currently have a lot of differences between them. One of them has worked since graduating from college in 2020, and the other is completing law school and will be joining the workforce in September.

I am looking forward to his graduation dinner, but am also fairly anxious. I can’t wait to celebrate him, and our accomplishment in having a child who is launching from school to a career feels good as a parent. I get overstimulated fairly easily, so having a dinner at a restaurant with 19 family members feels a little overwhelming.

I find myself talking about him to people I know OK well. I tell them about the upcoming job that has been offered to him.

They congratulate me, and I smile and indicate happiness to them.

I would change my anxiety about a trip filled with excitement and family to just looking forward to getting together.

One thing I’ve noticed, since working in the mental health field prior to and during COVID, is that anxiety drives a lot of us.

We want to do well in school, and study hard to get the positive reinforcement that good grades bring.

We want to follow rules, and trying to figure out which rules we were wanting to follow caused quite a bit of stress to a lot of people during COVID and continuing to today.

One of the diagnoses that I work with is anxiety in others. We work together to come up with positive ways to decrease their anxiety and to have some results that lower their feelings of angst.

I encourage each of you to enjoy this holiday season as much as you can. It can be tough, with members of our families who used to be with us missing family gatherings for multiple reasons.

Whether our family members are missing due to death or a change in holiday traditions, it can be hard as we celebrate the holiday season.

I hope you find something to enjoy today and as we get closer to Christmas and the New Year.

An Article in Voyage Dallas: Conversations with Terri Parke

Conversations with Terri Parke

Here’s an article that was published in Voyage Dallas. I’m excited to be a part of it.

Voyage Dallas is a magazine that publishes articles. Since I live in the North Texas area, fairly close to Dallas, I was a candidate for being included in their piece.

In the article I was able to talk a little about influencers in my history as an artist and a therapist, a saxophone player, and a little about how art affects me.

I’ve been working on this entrepreneur-ing thing for a while now, and was glad to be included in the magazine. Clicking on the link above should take you there, but if not a good old fashioned internet search to ‘voyage Dallas’ with ‘Terri Parke’ might help you find it.

Thanks to those of you who read these posts!