Sustainable Change & All the (Therapist) Things
ABOUT KELLI
Kelli Underwood, LCSW is a seasoned speaker, consultant, and psychotherapist, specializing in the field of trauma since 1996. Kelli inspires the changes her clients desire personally, professionally, or organizationally. She cultivates dynamic trainings and speaking experiences with her charisma, contagious energy, and skillfulness in teaching you HOW to create sustainable change.
Kelli facilitates training with organizations, various groups, schools, school systems, and individuals on a wide range of topics. Kelli was the Director of Child and Family Programs at Chicago at the Center For Contextual Change for fifteen years and an adjunct faculty member at the University of Chicago’s Master’s in Social Work Program for seven years, prior to launching her own business in 2013.
Kelli has specialized in facilitating healing from all forms of traumatic experiences for children, adolescents, adults, couples, and families. Kelli strives to help those affected by trauma to be able to have the tools they need to live healthy and fulfilling lives. She provides powerful healing retreats and trainings in Transformative Insight Imagery, a holistic healing technique. Her techniques and unique ability to connect with people at all stages on their healing journey have earned her praise from her peers and clients alike.
CONNECT WITH KELLI
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WHAT FLIPPED KELLI’S LID?
A series of events have taken Kelli on the journey to connecting to who she really is, but an early lid-flipping incident occurred when she was in high school. She didn’t realize that she was clinically depressed and wanted desperately to see a counselor even though her family and community were not familiar with the concept of seeing professional help from a therapist. After her first appointment, she felt so seen and heard that she decided as a high school senior to dedicate her life to becoming a therapist herself.
HOW DID KELLI FIND HER MODALITY AS A THERAPIST?
It was a long journey to building her confidence. She was her own worst critic in her own head. She had to go through a parallel process of healing herself and aligning modalities with what she was passionate about because of her own experiences.
Kelli likes having a wide variety of options to choose from for each of her unique clients. Kim shared that in her MSW program, she was told who she was going to be as a therapist. She instead wanted to be sure to be herself and put herself into the process with her patients. The reality is that the therapist is the modality when they are connected to self and working in ventral vagal.
WHAT CAN YOU TELL US A BIT ABOUT COMPASSION FATIGUE?
Energy management as explained in the book, The Power of Full Engagement that studied elite athletes shows that the only predictable variable between two athletes of equal ability was how they rested and recovered.
The more we manage our own energy, the greater our capacity to care for other people.
Kim shares that her capacity for avoiding compassion fatigue is very much centered on being an Enneagram 8. She thinks and acts before she feels, which allows her to see that when someone is going through something, it doesn’t become about her and how she feels, it’s about the other person.
The center for contextual change taught Kelli that every quality you use to describe yourself is both a vulnerability and an asset. All of our qualities are a two-sided coin that can either be a roadblock or a strength. Kelli gives the example of her over-focused ADD that allows her to tune the rest of the world out when she’s in a room with a client but finds herself crippled when she’s asked to multi-task.
WHAT CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT CHANGE?
The biggest challenge with sustainable change vs. general change.
We have to give value to the incremental change that we make. We get in our own way and sabotage ourselves when we can’t see the small successes. The culture trains us to notice what’s not working as opposed to what went well. We have to have supportive people to help us notice our incremental success in order to shift into sustainable change. Noticing is everything.
Kelli recently completed her training with Steve Terrell, co-author with Kathy King if Nurturing Resilience. Steve was asked when he knows that a patient is getting more capacity in their nervous system and when they are getting more regulated. He gave the example of a giant painting that has been in his office for ten years. When someone comes in more embodied, or having more moments of being settled, they will notice the painting as being new. There’s a great capacity for observation as our vision opens up. Noticing change is an important moment even if the newness is only in the patient’s consciousness!
WHAT IS TRANSFORMATIVE INSIGHT IMAGERY (TII)?
For Kelli, TII brought about one of her greatest Flip Your Lid moments. It’s foundational for her because all of the images come from the imager. The process of doing TII imaging is empowering because patients learn to use it on their own without their therapist. They are finding their own strength so they can access trust in themselves when they need it most.
It’s both a stabilizing technique and a transformative technique. The patient meets their left and right brain and learns how to balance them. People can be moved spiritually through TII. After resources are developed, Kelli works with clients on how to use them. There is then an eight-step process of moving into transformative healing.
We can’t change what happened, but we can transform how we hold it.
Kim is passionate about helping her clients and listeners learn about their nervous system and how to reconnect with who they really are. Trauma responses can be confusing and Kelli and Kim have dedicated their lives to help bring about clarity and transformation.
Learn more about Transformative Insight Imagery and how this modality can be used to bring healing, how Kelli uses polyvagal theory with her clients, listen to or watch the rest of this episode!
While you’re here, why not check out Kim’s book?
But Your Mother Loves You is the witty and candid tale of how a renowned psychotherapist moved from “not good enough” to “the right person” despite childhood neglect and a toxic relationship with her mother.
Everyone knows at least one person who demonstrates toxic love, someone who consistently jabs a straw in others and sucks the life right out of them. Without an in-depth understanding of how to navigate these relationships, most people continue to emotionally regress and remain paralyzed in familiar, pain-soaked patterns. But Your Mother Loves You helps readers overcome this cycle of toxicity.
Kim Honeycutt shares the real-life experience of how a shame-based, self-destructive little girl grew up to be a recovered alcoholic, entered the world of psychology as a professional, and created her own strategies to address and conquer toxicity.
This story, both witty and practical, is told through the lens of personal life experience and expert psychological strategies combined with Godly intervention. Readers learn how to either walk away from or walk with a toxic loved one without losing themselves. Covered in both vulnerability and clinical information, But Your Mother Loves You provides a step-by-step approach on how to stop toxic love and the subsequent self-abuse.