Today we’d like to introduce you to Tia Jennings.
Hi Tia, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I wanted to be a therapist for as long as I can remember. When I left home and went off to college at the University of North Texas, I immediately chose psychology as my major. I knew what my path was going to be, and I was focused, at that time, on changing the world one adolescent at a time. I worked hard through school, ended up graduating not from UNT but the University of Houston, and went straight into my master’s program at the Our Lady of the Lake University. I was one of the youngest ones in the program, as others were on their second career, but as I said, I knew that I wanted to be a therapist. After completing school, I found myself lost. I was lost in the hustle of psychiatric hospitals and community mental health agency trying to make sure I could pay my bills and support my children. The dream of being able to set my own schedule and only work while my kids were in school felt like such a far-fetched goal. But I’m a pretty determined person, and I knew that I still had this dream of being able to change the world, now one person at a time and not one adolescent at a time.
I opened Live Now Counseling in 2018 from the corner of my bedroom with not just the goal of changing the world but with the goal of changing the way that therapy was done. Live Now Counseling started as an exclusively online practice several years prior to online therapy becoming the norm. I remember the way people would call what we were doing unethical and questioned if there was any actual benefit to doing online therapy. I felt myself constantly defending what I was doing even though I knew that the connections that I was making with clients and the work that we were doing was so much than what I could do with most people in person.
Yet, it wasn’t just therapy that I was doing different; I wanted to do everything different or at least in line with what felt right to me. I focused on doing everything in a way that was true to me and did not send my anxiety through the roof! Systems were set to make connections, get clients, and grow in a way that was comfort for me. There was no way I was going door to door to be able to network and get clients. I wanted to be myself and not live with a mask up, pretending to be something that I was not. The more I worked on showing up in an authentic way the more I thought about the gaps that we have in our education as therapist. We are taught to be so closed off from our clients, and for me, that just didn’t sit right with me. I wanted to make connections with my clients, understand them, and watch them grow almost like a proud parent. I wanted to be able to also make sure that other aspiring therapist knew that they could show up as they are and do the things that they want without jeopardizing their ability to get clients and succeed in business.
In 2022, just months after expanding to also include in-person sessions, Live Now Counseling made a major shift to grow into an institute of learning for both graduate student interns needing a practicum site and LPC Associates that wanted to start building their own practice without having to do it all on their own.
With Live Now Counselings, my vision was to create the most innovative institute of training of therapist while serving the mental health needs of the community. I still want to change the world, but with a team of amazing students and licensed professionals, it didn’t have to be one person at a time anymore.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The roads are never smooth when it comes to business, especially the business of mental health. When you go through school you learn all the skills and theories that you think you’re going to need as a therapist, but when you get into the real world working with real clients and running a real business you find out pretty quickly how much you don’t really know. Working in the mental health field is not easy and it was especially not easy during the peak of covid when as a therapist myself I had to hold space for people that were going through the exact same things that I was going through. One of the things that we try to do as therapist is not guide people in areas that we are still struggling with, and that was not realistic during covid. The demands for therapy went up, and I was working long and hard hours. Once life started to return to “normal” things were still not settled. I tend to shake things up to keep life exciting but at the same time, the major shifts in the systems that I created messed up the way that I navigated things. Opening a physical location, bringing on graduate students, starting to supervise associates, getting additional certifications, and dealing with the ups and downs of client flow required me to constantly regroup and restructure the things that I thought were working for me.
Thanks – so, what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
Live Now Counseling as a whole has therapists that specialize in a variety of things, but it started with me and my focus on the treatment of anxiety disorders. I never knew how much my own struggles with anxiety in my life was going to be the thing that helped others with their anxiety. As a therapist, we are taught to keep self-disclosure at a minimum, but I didn’t shy away from letting my clients know my story and my own struggles with anxiety even to this day. What I did was normalize their experience for them, I gave them a feeling of not being alone in the things that they are dealing with in their life, I let them know that even people that run businesses struggle with some of the same things that they face each and every day.
Yet, in working with anxiety, one of the things that you see quickly is that the anxiety is often a symptom of trauma. I did not feel that in most cases that I could work with clients without also have deeper understanding and experience with working with trauma.
I’m most proud of my ability to be me. I know it sounds crazy, but when you work with as many clients as I’ve come across in 15 years, you realize how many versions of themselves that people have. I’m proud that I’m able to walk through life now just as myself. I’m able to walk into the therapy as myself. I’m able to run my business as myself. And in doing that, I’m able to guide clients to a place of acceptance with themselves, which leads to a happier life with a lot less anxiety.
Are there any books, apps, podcasts, or blogs that help you do your best?
I often laugh at myself for how much I use social media, especially TikTok, in being able to make hard things in life make sense. If you were to talk to any of my clients or any of those that I supervise, I guarantee everyone would be able to say that I have used a video from social media to be able to convey a point that makes sense to the general population. The thing with being a therapist is I know what I want to say and how to say it, but the reality is that how I say it does not always resonate with those that I work with, so I find other ways to deliver the same message.
I’m not a big reader so book suggestions is something I rarely do and the majority of the podcasts I listen to are true crime which helps to relax my mind.
When it comes to resources, one of the best ones that I have always found is my client themselves. So, many of them already have everything they need inside of them, and I just help them to find it and use it.
Pricing:
- Licensed Therapist – $150
- Provisionally Licensed Therapist- $110-$130
- Graduate Student Interns – $40-$60
Contact Info:
- Website: www.livenowcounseling.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/lnchouston
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/livenowcounseling
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/33519663/admin/feed/posts/
