Mental Health, Story Work with Therapist Cyndi Mesmer

Cyndi Mesmer – colleague, mentor and friend to Danielle. She’s first and foremost a wife and a mom of five. She’s a therapist and owns her own group practice called Art of Living Counseling based out of Illinois. She also works at the Allender Center, based out of Seattle, WA, and wears many hats as a teacher and trainer as well as story facilitator. Cyndi is an avid reader and loves to hang out with her kids.

Cyndi is doing well, just came off of a 4-day intensive at the Allender Center called Story Workshop where they engaging trauma stories and teaching. It’s both a blast and so much fun as well we exhausting. She likens it to deep sea diving; you go down deep and then have to come up for air every once and while before going back down. She’s well but really busy.

Danielle says it feels like the mental health field is slammed during this ongoing trauma of COVID.

Cyndi enthusiastically agrees it is slammed! Initially when COVID hit she felt like they bought into the idea that it was just going to be three weeks, and then we’ll be back at the office and everything will be well. But three weeks turned into six weeks, then three months, then here we are [18 months later] and it just keeps going. “In many ways, it turned the world upside down.”

She is experiencing in her practice within the mental health field a huge influx of people needing care. Her view is that the trauma that has been embedded in people bodies that normally stays hidden—under coping mechanisms and other techniques to suppress, ignore or avoid—has come to the surface during COVID. She sees this playing out for her clients in their family dynamics, their marriages, with people struggling with depression and anxiety and are now seeking help.

Cyndi doesn’t know many therapists that don’t have completely full practices—everyone is full. She herself has a 45 person wait-list and finds herself emailing around every week to see if there are any therapists in her network that have room for new clients. She’s even trying to hire new therapists for her counseling group to in order to try to meet the demands for mental health care. And it’s not just adults who are looking for care—Cyndi says adolescences are having a really hard time.

Maggie asks if Cyndi if the actual work she does with clients has changed at all since the pandemic start.

Cyndi thinks people now are more “raw”; they are showing up more authentically and eager to do the work that they need to do because of the unprecedented levels of distress they are feeling. Before people before the pandemic would come to therapy for “crisis resolution”– to fix an immediate issue—but they didn’t really want to get to the underside of what’s actually causing their symptoms or to engage the embedded trauma in their bodies. They would come for a few sessions and feel better and be gone. But with the pandemic, everyone’s schedules, routines and nervous systems are getting triggered and changed. What seems like it would be restful—being more at home and slowing down—has actually unsettled people and created a significant amount of distress for their nervous systems. Everyone is exhausted! The people who are coming to therapy now are doing really good work because they are more ready, raw and eager to do the deep work of engaging the underlying trauma.

Danielle has felt like a mental health emergency responder. She says is it like the past trauma shows up in ways that creates internal activation; People want to get regulated and to learn to self-regulate knowing that the isolation could continue.

What comes with that, Cyndi says, is confusion. People are asking, “why am I experiencing what I am experiencing? They can name that we’re in a pandemic or that their kids are now at home when they would have been at school, but there is so much more going on and people don’t really know what is happening. Now they are willing to unpack the hard stuff.

Maggie says the disruption that occurred globally with the pandemic triggered internal disruption for people on the individual level. Pre-pandemic people normally on a regular everyday basis have good coping skills, tools, resources and mechanisms for getting through the day. But when the world turned upside with the pandemic, the disruption caused their coping skills to not be as effective. This left people wondering, “what is happening to me?”

Some of those defense mechanisms, Cyndi said, were actually built into structures—they were tied to our routines and schedules. “We are routine structured people: we operate really well, our bodies operate well, when we have routine, structure, a typical schedule we follow. I think our bodies like that. I think our bodies operate best like that.” And when the pandemic hit, it disrupted and upset our normal routines and schedules and our bodies didn’t know what to do with that.

Her schedule changed: Now, she goes to her office once a week when she used to go 4 times a week. And when she’s home. she has to contend with her kids being home when she didn’t have to do that when she was at work. Her body is confused because it used to be when she was home, she spent time with her kids but now she’s working from home most days. It’s a big shift and change.

Cyndi believes all the change is activating people’s nervous systems, their embedded trauma and their attachment issues. The profound sense of isolation is what she thinks triggering people’s attachment issues—their anxious-ambivalent attachment, their avoidant attachment. The language she uses is that the younger parts of people that are embedded in the very neurons of their bodies are being activated and are coming up to the surface. She says this feels like a sense of powerlessness, looming fear and indecision (not knowing what to do).

Danielle said even when she’s in her office she feels the attachment with her kids—she says when she comes out of a therapy s