Interview by Mercedes Arnold

Maine Vibes Magazine: Can you start by introducing yourself and state your pronouns and talk about what you do? 

Nikki Yardy: My name is Nikki Yardy, my pronouns are she/her, and I work in all things women's mental health. I'm primarily a therapist and Master's level clinician and I provide mental health services for women, which has grown into a few different things. I own a women's counseling center, Virago Wellness, we've got a handful of clinicians and interns training to be therapists, all working with women. I also host women's groups as well that aim to build community and connection for women. I like to branch out into different types of things. 

MVM: How long have you been in LCPC? Can you talk about what that is?

NY: An LCPC is a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor. I just had my 10-year anniversary, which is wild that I’ve been in the field for a decade already. It's pretty cool.

MVM: Congratulations on 10 years! What type of clinical hours did you need to become an LCPC?

NY: You have to have a master's degree and complete two years, or 3000 supervised hours of work to become fully independently licensed. From then on you've got to do 55 hours of continuing education every two years.

MVM: What is finding the continuing education courses like? 

NY: Well, it’s interesting, I've been a trainer as well and held training for clinicians for continuing education. There are a handful of organizations locally, nationally, and internationally. As long as it's approved by the licensing boards, you can take their courses. There’s a mix of things such as supervising interns, teaching courses, and reading books that can count towards those hours, but most of it is formal training. Sometimes people will find areas of interest and focus their additional training on their area of work and interest.

For example, my specialty is trauma and trauma related to interpersonal violence. I'm an EMDR therapist, which requires hours and hours of training. It becomes one of those things where you go down a rabbit hole, and it's hard to not get the continuing education credits because you're following what you're curious about in the work that you want to do. We have a team member who's interested in grief work and is becoming a death doula. We have a person on the team who does couples work, and she's certified in a couple of different couples therapy modalities. The things that you're interested in can snowball when pursuing additional education.

MVM: What led you to want to become a therapist and focus on women’s mental health? You also accept and work with trans and nonbinary clients, is that right?

NY: I worked in the mental health field for a few years before I was a counselor. I learned that LGBTQ+ and BIPOC have higher rates of mental health issues, partly because of oppression and discrimination. It became clear to me that we need to be focusing on mental health from a social justice perspective. It’s taking in the whole picture, and then we’re not pathologizing normal reactions to external stressors. 

MVM: How did you get into the field?

NY: It was very haphazard. I had always worked with people, I was originally in education and didn't love the bureaucracy in the field. I knew I wanted to do something that had a positive impact on the world. I worked in marketing for an organic food business for a while and didn't love the cubicle life, it was very boring and tedious for me.

I had this period of time in my 20s, like many, where I felt lost and was trying to figure out my life. I got into hiking and camping and met a friend who worked in wilderness therapy and thought, I want to do that. I had never been backpacking and the only form of camping I had done was car camping. I had never worked with at-risk youth. But I found a program in Colorado where they had a boy’s program for 10 years and they were starting a girl’s program. They were looking for a team member and ended up hiring me. I packed up everything I owned and moved to Colorado. I didn’t know anyone, and when I got there everyone was watching me struggling to put my tent together and taking bets on how long I would last. 

I ended up working there for nine months. We would be in the backcountry for eight days and then off for six. We were working with adjudicated youth, ex-gang members, and kids who had been convicted of crimes. They came to our program instead of serving jail time. It wasn’t a boot camp, it was a therapeutic program. It was fu– wait, can I swear? 

MVM: Yeah, absolutely. 

NY: It was fucking awesome. It was life-changing for me. I had never been away from home, I have a history of trauma. It was amazing to do something healing and empowering for myself and work with these kids who had rarely had experiences of empowerment or support. We did group therapy every night and had one-on-ones and check-ins. 

There was one girl in particular that I grew really close with and during one of our one-on-one sessions she was building up to tell me something and ended up disclosing some horrific incidents of abuse, she looked me dead in the eye and asked, why did this happen to me? I knew I would never be able to answer anything like that, but it was that moment when it clicked for me that I wanted to be able to help people like her heal from those things and I knew I was going to need the proper training to do so. From there, I applied to grad school and worked in a few other mental health settings and it’s been nonstop ever since. 

MVM: What was the program called? 

NY: It was called San Juan Wilderness in Colorado, but it doesn't exist anymore. There’s an alternative-to-detention program in Maine called Maine Youth-LED Justice (previously Maine Youth Court). They are phenomenal. They are doing some great work to keep kids in school and out of jail, their work is really great and you should definitely check them out. 

MVM: Thank you, I will! So in my research about you, your work seems to focus on self-confidence. I’m curious about your practice with self-confidence. How do you check in with yourself to build self-confidence? 

NY:  I feel like for women, in particular, and people with trauma history, self-confidence and self-worth are big challenges. A lot of it is healing. There is the day-to-day stuff that we do now to take care of ourselves, but going back to the past and figuring out, How did I get here? What were the contributing factors to this? Figuring out how those stories were built. A lot of these things become core beliefs like I’m not good enough, I can’t do it, it’s not going to go well, I’m going to fail… each person has their own individual wired-in networks of negative thinking. If you can go back and heal from those past experiences, which is really hard work and takes time, having lived experiences of success helps. 

That was the wilderness program for me, I learned to stand on my own two feet. The stories about near tornadoes, forest fires, lightning strikes, I lived through those things and realized, Oh wow, I can handle some shit. You can sort of develop confidence in that way, through lived experiences. 

And then a lot of it is, like you said, day-to-day practice. I do a lot of journaling and mindfulness and meditation. Not meditation in the traditional sense, but turning into myself, ongoing therapy, etc. There’s the regular taking care of yourself, having another person to talk through things and identify what’s a challenge for you and keep that maintenance up. 

A lot of it is also community and support, regularly connecting with other people. I love all types of community, but the community of women in particular, where you have somebody that you can be vulnerable with and honest about the things you’re struggling with and get care and support and give it in return, I think those really change confidence challenges for us too.

MVM: I think everyone struggles with self-confidence sometimes, I certainly do. During the beginning of the pandemic I was really depressed and feeling down about myself and I found a woman online who was talking to herself in the mirror, complementing herself and I started doing that every morning, and it seemed to help me so much. Telling myself that I was a badass, I could get through the day and my meetings.

NY: Oh, that's awesome. On the bathroom mirror at Virago, we have a little sign that says Take it easy on yourself today. How we think about ourselves and see ourselves in the mirror are so important. Yeah, that's a great strategy.

MVM: I definitely appreciate reminders like that and love seeing your posts and stories about self-confidence and self-worth. Switching gears, earlier you mentioned EMDR, could you talk about what that is and why you decided to incorporate it as an offering at your practice? 

NY: EMDR is Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, it was developed in the 1980s. It’s going back and reprocessing past memories that trickle into your life today. I flirted with EMDR for years before I finally actually dove in and did the training. There's a handful of modalities for therapists that require a lot of extensive training. The more I learned about EMDR, the more I felt like I had to try it. To complete the initial training, you attend two, three-day long weekends, and after the first day of the first weekend, I was thinking, This is so cool.

I now have some clients that I’ve been working with for five or six years doing traditional talk therapy, and as soon as we started EMDR, the progress that they’ve been making is wild. High level, what it does is reduce the intensity of your symptoms. If you have a traumatic memory, intrusive thoughts, images, body sensations, and emotions, it dials down the intensity of those things. People can approach their trauma in a way that’s not triggering or overwhelming. They can remain calm while they do it. It is very intensive, but I’ve never seen progress like this for any other modality that I’ve practiced. 

MVM: It sounds like a very interesting method of therapy. So getting into your practice, Virago Wellness, what year did you form it? 

NY: I went into private practice part-time working with women in 2016, then full-time, and started Virago in 2018, and we are based in South Portland. It’s grown in ways that I never imagined, which is really cool. 

MVM: Can you talk about the naming of Virago? 

NY: Virago is Latin for unruly woman, and I really love that idea of a woman who doesn’t follow societal norms. Who is to decide what the norm is in terms of gender roles? Again, it goes back to helping people figure out who they want to be for themselves and cater to each individual. Most people who come to us don’t feel like a warrior, but our goal is to try and help our clients get to a place where they feel empowered, secure, and confident so that they can take steps to help themselves. 

MVM: One of your missions listed on your website is to help women tune into their inner voices. Can you talk about this?

NY: Often women are, and this is true for a lot of humans, but women, in particular, we're so disconnected from ourselves. We also have all these experts telling you what you need to do. I think the first step is really getting women to tune into themselves. We all operate from what's called the client-centered perspective. It's a very feminist-based model as well of helping the individual become the authority on themselves. So getting women to be able to tune in to what's going on for them, how are they feeling? What are their needs? And then having the skills to decide to act on whatever those needs are. 

A great example might be assertiveness. I was working with a client the other day that has health issues and doesn't feel like the diagnosis she's getting from her medical provider is accurate. Tuning into that voice of you feeling like what you're being told is not actually what you're experiencing. It’s about helping amplify that self-awareness and then developing the skills to assert herself with her medical providers. If somebody knows what's going on for themselves they can identify their needs. If you can take and practice those skills in your relationships and work and all kinds of other areas, you're going to benefit from that.

MVM: Yeah, so with the inner voice, it's recognizing when something comes up, and reminding yourself, okay, I need to listen to this voice that's coming up for me, right?

NY: Yeah, and a lot of that's body-oriented.  We're kind of walking around like floating heads, like stop and again mindfulness. I'm not a super woo-woo person, I'm really a nerd for science, but it really does work to stop and check in and say, Okay, how do I feel about this? What are what am I thinking? So much so that in my women's groups that's how we start every session, we pause for a minute, check in with our bodies, check in with our breath, and think about how we're feeling and what's going on. We don't have a lot of opportunities to do that these days, but when you start to do that regularly, a lot of really good stuff can happen.

MVM: Absolutely. So can you tell me about your dog, Bash? You’re training him to be a therapy dog? 

NY: Bash is a German Shepherd and is almost three. The plan has always been to get him trained as a therapy dog to do volunteer work but also have him come with me and work with my clients. He’s an absolute sweetheart, he loves people, and he comes with me to work every day. I don’t incorporate him into therapy work yet as he has to be certified to do that. He has to complete a test to be certified and hasn’t passed as of yet. One of the tests requires him to be attentive while other dogs are around and as of right now, he gets too anxious to pass. 

So in true-to-form fashion, I have a lot of things going on. Some of the work that I've done is volunteering with the American Red Cross disaster response services as a mental health professional. When there's a disaster, you deploy out to the disaster site and check in with folks who have been affected. A lot of my colleagues were down in Florida after hurricane Ian. So therapy dog work can be done in a couple of ways in response to natural disasters like Ian, where you bring the dog to the sites or you can incorporate the dog into the actual therapy process like individual work with clients. So this was my hope for getting Bash certified as a therapy dog.

MVM: I see him in your stories all the time, he’s very cute. So on top of all of the things you’re doing, you offer workshops, right? What’s your process like for developing these workshops? Who do they serve? 

NY: I listen to what it is that people are needing, what they are struggling with, and then I pair that with my passions and curiosities. Most of the workshops I have done are things that I wish women knew about. Whether it’s self-worth issues or understanding trauma. I’ve done some workshops about what emotions are. Most of my workshops are things I feel people could benefit from and information that I wish folks had. Other types of workshops I do are lived experiences, so bringing in that wilderness therapy perspective. The kids that we were working with would experience rock climbing for the first time and feel fear but do it anyway and experience empowerment. The other type of workshop I do is my women’s group, Wild Hearted Women, which I’ve been doing for about three years now. They are fabulous and something I look forward to every week. 

MVM: What made you want to start doing that group? 

NY: I had done a workshop with Hustle and Flow a few years ago and it was about self-care, and part of it was discussing our experiences with it. It was a group of about 10 women and everyone was going around talking about what was challenging about self-care. One of the women mentioned that we should do it every week and I thought it sounded fun, so I started with a group that met every other week for an hour. It was a quick drop-in thing people could come to if they wanted to. It got popular really quickly to the point where I had to cap how many could attend. Now, we meet every week for 10 weeks for 90 minutes. But that’s where it started and continues to morph from there. It’s intentionally not a therapy group, it’s more of a support group for people to foster friendships in. It’s really great. 

MVM: It’s nice to have a community like that. Is there anything else you’d like to share? 

NY: I think the biggest thing from my personal experience from a decade as a therapist is that people sit with things in their lives all the time that are uncomfortable and they may feel like it has to be that way. I would love for people to know, and women in particular, that it doesn't have to be that way. If there's something that you're struggling with, reach out to a therapist, educate yourself, read books and do the research. There are a lot of things that we can do to change the things that are difficult in our day-to-day lives. I want people to know that change is possible. It's remarkable the type of healing that can happen, and I don't think everybody knows or thinks that it’s possible.

MVM: Thank you, Nikki. I am a big advocate for therapy as well. I appreciate you sharing that. What would you say to someone who is hesitant to start therapy? 

NY: A lot of it is the fit with the therapist. It's not a cookie-cutter thing, you've got to find the right person. Sometimes you have to sit with the person for a couple sessions to figure out if they're the right person. All therapists are trained to help you through that process. Part of our intake process that we tell folks is if, for some reason, we're not the fit for you, let us know and we'll help you get connected to somebody else. Sometimes it does take trial and error to find the right therapist for you. I also think some of it is style, too. For some people, EMDR can be really great because you're not necessarily talking through all of the details, and for folks who maybe don't want to do that process, it can be a better fit. Other folks do want to talk through the details, so it’s important to find the right type of therapy and style. Again, you might have to try a few different styles of therapy, too. I also think about the reasons why someone might be hesitant and ask myself why. 

MVM: Thank you, it does help to realize you don’t need to be stuck with a therapist if you feel like the partnership isn’t working, you can find someone else that suits your needs. 

NY: Absolutely. 

Thank you to Nikki Yardy for taking the time to talk with Maine Vibes Magazine!

Web: http://www.viragowellness.com

Instagram: @viragowellness and @nikkiyardy

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