Episode 1: What Raised to Empower Is All About

You are listening to the Raise to Empower podcast. I'm your host, Ashley Comegys, a licensed clinical social worker with a multi-state online therapy practice. I have a passion for empowering women and mom therapists to break free of the fear, overwhelm, and oppressive systems that hold them back from taking action and building the private practice of their dreams.

My goal is for you to boldly believe in yourself as a clinician and business owner. If you are looking for a place to learn, practice, building, strategy and skill, while also claiming your own power as a woman and a therapist, then you are in the right place. Welcome to the show. So this is episode one of the Race and Power Podcast.

I am Ashley Comegys, your host. Um, this is really exciting to be recording this first episode. This has been a project of love that if I truly look back over the course of many years, has slowly been building in the background to eventually come into fruition today. Have you ever had times in your life when you take a moment to step back and with a bird's eye view, all of a sudden certain events or periods of time in life make so much sense because they led you to where you are?

Right. That's how I feel about where I am and starting this podcast in. If you're listening to this at the time this episode is released, today is the start of Women's History Month, and it's by no accident that I decided to launch this podcast at the beginning of this month that celebrates the works, trials, and accomplishments of women throughout history.

This podcast is meant to be a vehicle for empowering fellow women and mom clinicians to build and grow their own therapy practices in ways that provide them with the time freedom, flexibility, and autonomy that they crave. And while this show will have episodes where I'm by myself giving you strategies and tools and mindset work to help you in your business, this podcast is also a way to highlight other women in the field who are doing incredible work.

So whether they're doing innovative things in the therapy room, or building additional businesses or income streams beyond therapy, or are supporting women and mom clinicians in some aspect of their practice. Business or personal life, this show will be a platform for them. So I wanna just first back up a bit because you may know me, you may not , and so I wanna just share a bit about who I am and how I got to where I am today.

Just to help you give a little backstory and just a little bit more understanding of who I am. When I look back at the events that led to me eventually going to grad school to get my M s W, uh, my Master's in Social work, you know, it feels kind of like one of those dove, of course you were gonna do that, Ashley, but at the time, some of the doors closing and opening felt really painful and confusing.

So I'm gonna go way back for a minute. From the time that I was in eighth grade and I got to shadow an OB nurse for career day and witness an actual birth, yes. At 14 years old . Um, from that time on, I was set on becoming an OBGYN. I wanted to help women in their journey of pregnancy and deliver their babies, and I focused all of my school efforts on a goal to go to college pre-med and head off to medical school immediately after.

It was this singular goal that I kind of built my identity on at such a young age, . And if you ask anybody who knew me well during those years and ask, what did Ashley wanna be when she grew up? They will 100%, without a doubt, immediately tell you she wanted to be an OBGYN. And yet for a variety of reasons, that dream quickly began to fade after starting college.

I felt kind of shattered in certain ways because what I thought I always wanted to do was now gone. You know, this identity I had kind of created of, I'm gonna be this doctor. I felt lost. I felt confused. And so I did what every confused college student does and changed my major to psychology, and it felt like the right thing to do.

Again, I didn't know what I was gonna do with it, but that just seemed like, okay, that's the next step. So, fast forward a few years in August 29th, 2005 is a day that forever changed so many people's lives and propelled my life forward to where it is. I was safe at my college, hundreds of miles away in Pennsylvania, but Hurricane Katrina was ravaging New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

The aftermath of that storm led me eventually to spending a semester helping run a disaster relief camp on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, and that experience completely propelled me forward towards getting my Master's in social work. And as a bright, eyed, naive, and energetic young social worker, like every other starting out, mental health professional, I thought I was gonna change the world.

I threw myself into my work and I went above and beyond to support my clients, prove my worth, knowledge, and dedication and experience. And like every other bright item, bushy-tailed news social worker, I hit a wall and I burned. Very, very quickly , I changed jobs and burned out again. It wasn't maybe quite as fast that time, but it definitely happened.

I was working for state run mental health organizations, nonprofits, community health teams, and larger medical organizations. I knew I was in the right field and I knew I was there to help people, but my God, there was no way that I was gonna be able to stain this for years and years. I was just burning out.

And when I look back at the first six years of my career, I definitely can see where there are certain things that I did that contributed to my burnout. But what is also glaringly obvious to me now is the micro and macrosystem at play that absolutely had a hefty hand in me feeling overwhelmed.

Exhausted and questioning my career at only 28 years old systems. That perpetuated the mindset that as a social worker, I should help anyone and everyone that created this belief that I shouldn't expect to make a lot of money. Because you chose this field, right? Like this is what you're supposed to. It perpetuated the belief that burnout was just a part of life in this work, in this field.

That working exhausting hours for very little pay was normal and acceptable. The belief that self-care is important, but not actually changing the expectations of the work to help support those efforts, right? That the people higher up tell us that, but they don't do anything to actually support. Systems that have us accepting that even in a low paying field, that it was normal for my male counterparts with less experience than me to get paid significantly more and had me believing that if you spoke up with concerns or questions, that you were actually the one with the problem versus the systems you're raising the concerns about.

A sense that the status quo is just as good as it gets this. Is it a belief that you better stay within specific boundaries in boxes or else you are the troublemaker? And that perpetuated and normalized that working way more than 40 hours a week without additional pay is just how it is. It wasn't until I ventured into the world of private practice that I truly began to recognize the mindset that had been instilled in me from the beginning of my career.

And it took a lot of work internally for me to recognize the narratives that were perpetuating the system of burnout in my. It was in launching and building my own online practice that I truly began to shake free of these systems. And yet there are absolutely larger systems that continue to impact me as a woman and a mom with a business.

After meeting my husband who is active duty in the Coast Guard, we ended up getting stationed on the island of Maui in Hawaii. And yes, don't get me wrong, it is absolutely beautiful, but it can be really challenging place to live for so many reasons. One of them being finding work. I had been in the field for a while at that point and was independently licensed, yet I could not find a.

The options were really limited, and those that did exist weren't going to really pay me well or give me the flexibility that I needed. I remember feeling so confused and defeated. I had worked so hard to get to this point in my career, and I had left the place I considered home and where my professional network existed and all my friends.

I questioned if I was going to be able to stay in this field, if the military was gonna force us to move every few years, how was I possibly going to actually grow and advance in my career? And I didn't have kids yet, so I was naive to what the extra burden of having kids and being a partner of somebody in the military means.

When I started my master's program, I had a dream of working for a nonprofit. Doing policy work, you know, being an agent of change in some kind of larger system. I wanted to work up to be a director of an organization. And only because I think I thought that's what success looked like in this field, that that's like the pinnacle of success.

That's what it was. And so when I look back, I am so grateful because on the very first day of class, I don't know how I got the luck of the draw to be in this particular class with this particular professor on that day, but he took the whole first class to simply lay out for us what is the process from grad school through licensure?

What can you do with the different licenses? How do you get there? What are the steps you need to to complete to sit for those exams? And at that time, I had no interest in private practice or working at the more individual level one-on-one with clients. But I will never forget as he laid out what the process was to get to be an L C S W, which is the highest licensure in Louisiana where I started.

As he laid out that whole process, he raised the point that if you ever found yourself in a position where you couldn't find a job with your L C S W, you could work for yourself and have a private. and somehow a light bulb went off for me at that moment. Not that like I, I still was not headed for private practice at that time.

I definitely was not. I was still headed towards that more macro work, but I saw that highest licensure as an insurance policy, something I could create some kind of security for myself, should I ever end up in the position where work wasn't available. So, to find myself in that exact position less than a decade later seemed like no accident.

When I decided at that time to start the process of building my practice, the truth is I had no idea what the hell I was doing. None. I absolutely, 100% made many, many mistakes along the way. Lots of them, lots and lots of them, . But throughout it all, what I found to be the most beautiful thing is that when I step back and look at my practice, I can point to it and I can say I did.

that is mine. I built a business in a way that I wanted to, in a way that serves me and my family. I got to choose the clients that I wanna work with, which interestingly enough, remember that middle school version of me that wanted to be an OBGYN? Yeah. So full circle. What is so interesting and ironic to me is that I now specialize in working with women with perinatal mood and anxiety disorder.

And that's the population that I have chosen to serve. Not because somebody higher up has told me that I have to, not because an agency has dictated this, but because this is what I have chosen to focus my clinical work on. And I've built this practice completely online. I've built it this way because I have needed it to be built that way because as a mom and the spouse of a military service member, it's allowed me to have growth, consistency, and flexibility in my.

I get to choose when and where I work, and it gets to come with me no matter where we have to move. And as I've built my online practice, I begin connecting with other women and mom, clinicians who had this deep desire to have the same time freedom and flexibility and autonomy that I have found in my own practice.

But they have had all the same narratives plaguing them, that have plagued me since the beginning. All that same mindset and larger systems that have tried to hold us back. So this is why I'm so passionate about working with other women clinicians to help them not only put the tangible pieces together to build their practices, but also to break free of the fear, overwhelm, and systems that hold them back and to step out in confidence to claim the power of having complete control over their career.

Raised to empower is the idea that as we are lifted up, encouraged and empowered, we need to raise and empower others as. Just as I was empowered by other women along my journey, I now want to empower other women along their journeys as. So why am I now creating this podcast? I wanna be able to help support as many women and mom clinicians as I possibly can in this podcast, is one of the ways for me to do that.

I want this to be a place that you know that when you listen, you're gonna get practical tips and strategies to grow your practices. Shift your mindset from one of fear and worry to one of strength and abundance and openness. So I hope you'll join me here weekly, knowing that when each episode is over, either from me or from a guest of the show, that you'll be leaving feeling challenged in a good way.

feeling stronger and feeling empowered to build your practice the way you want to. They thank you so much for listening to The Raise to Empower podcast. Check the show notes for all links and resources mentioned in the. If you found today's episode helpful or inspiring, be sure to share it with your therapist friends, and don't forget to subscribe to the show and leave your five star rating and review.

It truly means so much to me and will help us get our message of empowerment out to other women and mom clinicians, and I'd love to connect with you in our Facebook community. So check out the show notes for the link or head to https://bit.ly/raisedtoempower  to join us. I'll see you back here next week.