About Megan Smith, LCAT, LPC, MT-BC, IMH-E ®
I live in Rochester, NY with my college sweetheart, two cats, and my grandma’s baby grand piano. I'm honored to be an auntie, I’m humbled to be a sister, I'm challenged to be a daughter, and I'm grieving the loss of being a grand-daughter.
This relationship-based work invites us to bring our personal selves into the professional world.
About Me
Here's a little bit more about me and how I came to be doing this work in this way.
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Grounded in Mindfulness
I’ll invite you to join me in the present moment and we’ll just be.
Before I started prioritizing a few days a year for silent meditation, I walked the fields, hedgerows, and meadows of my rural childhood home. I found the peace of wild things and slept under the stars surrounded by fireflies. I skated on the iced over creek and celebrated with bonfires. I collected maple sap and boiled it down to maple syrup. I rose at dawn to feed the sheep and chickens. I sat vigil while baby llamas and sheep were born. I savored the present moment.
Celebrating Culture
I believe your cultural identity is the key to knowing your unique resilience. We’ll unfurl that together.
As a White therapist working with children and families that didn’t look like me, often identifying as Black, I had to confront my hard-wired assumptions, biases and tightly held beliefs. I began to understand my White privilege as well as the harm of being raised in a bigoted monoculture. I faced down the White Supremacy in my bones and learned that racism was hurting us all. Following this line of inquiry, supported by amazing Black teachers, mentors and thought leaders, I discovered my ancestry, and began to consider my own cultural routines, rituals, and joy. In this process I feasted on the survival, resistance, and humanity I found while I chewed on the pain and trauma there too. This is just one of the ways I celebrate culture and creativity. I wonder what yours will be.
Centering Relationships
I’ll wonder with you about the important relationships in your life, and we’ll check in about the relationship we’re building.
In my education as a therapist I was taught to “build rapport” and “meet people where they are”. I also learned about attachment research. It wasn’t until I started to work as a Child Parent Psychotherapist (CPP) that I truly began to understand the power of relationships. I saw how a parent that had experienced childhood trauma and neglect and felt disconnected from their baby could change how they related to their own child if they allowed themselves to wonder about the important relationships in their life and their child’s thoughts and feelings.
Steadfastly Trauma-Informed
I’ll hold in mind what happened to you, and we’ll be curious about how that past shows up in the present.
In the years I spent working with children and families interfacing with the Child Welfare system, I got up close and personal with trauma of all kinds: chronic, multi-generational, relational, racialized, and systemic. The scars that neglect, abuse, and loss can leave on us show up in how we experience the world, how we see ourselves, and how we engage in relationships. A trauma-informed lens feels like gentle, loving-kindness and compassion for all the pain we carry.
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Embodied Somatic Practice
I’ll bring my regulated nervous system to work and we’ll notice what is showing up for you in your breath and body.
I have the privilege of being trained as a Creative Arts Therapist. We learned to express ourselves with sound, movement, and imagery instead of words. We learned that the brain stores traumatic memories away from the areas that process through speech and language. I’ve come to learn that we don’t always have words for our experiences (especially those that we experienced as infants), but our bodies remember. I’ve come to learn that if the body endured the trauma, then healing must also include the body.
Collaborative & Creative
I’ll partner with you as your cultural story unfolds through memories, stories, songs, recipes, prayers, poems, dance, play, sound, etc.
In my journey of learning to decolonize myself and my work, I’ve come to understand that collaboration and partnership is my natural state. This disrupts the way I was taught to become a therapist, which kept the therapist in a position of power. In the same way, I embrace your innate creativity as an expression of your humanity, which our cultural bodies have used to overcome pain, trauma, war, separation, oppression, and erasure since the beginning of time.
