In this episode, we cover a range of topics including Imposter Syndrome, Internal Family Systems (IFS), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), value systems, clinician identity, white savior complex, and more! Join me, Kim Honeycutt, as I interview Nicole Madonna, Clinical Social Work/Therapist, LCSW.
ABOUT NICOLE
Nicole Madonna received her master’s in Social Work from Fordham University. She has an extensive background in college mental health, program development, training, and therapy with adults for the past 20 years.
Her clinical focus has been in treating complex trauma including survivors of sexual and interpersonal violence, grief and loss, intersectional identities and the trauma associated with this, work with the LGBT community, (specifically transgender and gender non-conforming individuals), and crisis intervention and assessment.
She is bilingual in Spanish and has spent much of her professional life working and living in communities of predominantly Spanish speaking individuals and families. Nicole has an eclectic approach to treating individuals. She incorporates feminist theory, relational cultural theory, and existential and narrative therapy. She is trained in ACT, CBT, and various crisis and trauma response and intervention techniques. She utilizes an intersectional social justice lens to help work with all aspects of the client’s experiences.
In this episode, Nicole shares how she came to a point of burnout and compassion fatigue in her professional life, leading to a transition into running her own practice serving other clinicians. Her own therapy process revealed raging imposter syndrome, a concept she educates us on in this interview. Check it out!
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While there were many developmental life moments, Nicole identified one more recent event in her life that flipped her lid. She tells of a time not too long ago when she experienced a professional identity crisis as a therapist. Burnout and compassion fatigue from engaging in trauma day in and day out, left Nicole contemplating a different type of position, still within the mental health profession, but no longer doing therapy.
In that same season, COVID-19 took her caseload from more than full to almost nothing. This led her to begin a private practice and entered into a process with another therapist who specializes in working with other therapists. Kim asked Nicole to share more about how she found herself experiencing compassion fatigue and she explains that there was a pivotal moment at the intersection of the new demands of a professional promotion to Director of her counseling center and a personal crisis of divorce.
Looking at internal family systems became the focus of her own therapy and through exploring those things, she found that imposter syndrome was flaring. Dr. Richard Schwartz personally trained Kim in internal family systems and shares that his teaching helps us identify different parts of ourselves and figure out the essence of self. Nicole is a firstborn with perfectionist tendencies and a huge sense of responsibility. Working to reconcile some of that recognizing that she was worthy and that she had worked to earned things she has in her career and her life.
Nicole notes that it was helpful to engage with a therapist who does things differently than she does as a therapist. And that helped her identify that she wanted to focus on her own practice— helping other mental health professionals, activists, advocates, medical professionals, front line responders to any human crisis.
Imposter syndrome was one of the main issues that Nicole discovered in her own therapy when she realized that she didn’t like to memorize authors and theories, but served from the heart and who she is as a clinician, which led her to make assumptions about how she would be perceived by other therapists. She began to identify that she was hiding parts of herself and holding an inaccurate view of her own professional experience. She was co-existing with her own anxiety and imposter syndrome at the same time as she was putting herself out there for new roles and positions.
Kim notes that if how someone else views you incongruent with how you view yourself, you might be experiencing imposter syndrome. She asserts that the self-doubt and internal critic is not ourselves. Nicole looked for the origins of those negative thoughts and feelings and found that there were moments when she felt she couldn’t be perfect. As the eldest with a large age gap with her younger siblings, she internalized a great sense of responsibility and wanted to be a role model, but struggled with feeling like a failure when she couldn’t do something perfectly.
As a social work student at 20 years old, Nicole was told that she had to address her own life experience in order to be an effective therapist, but she wasn’t able to resolve everything by the time she graduated so she went into program development. Kim shares that it’s significant to recognize that external critical voices.
“Our words carry so much power.” -Nicole Madonna
Kim asks who her mentor was that was compassionate and helpful and saw the truth in her. Nicole says while she was in Arizona with Ameri-core, she realized she wanted to get back to NYC where she was from and thankfully, her aunt who owned an employee assistance program hired her to do provider relations work while she was in grad school. The environment was warm and affirming and her aunt took her under her wing.
Kim asked if that experience led her to work with the marginalized. Nicole shares that as a white clinician in a Spanish-speaking community made her face some internalized bias and messaging. She had to make mistakes, be humble, and remove the white savior suit that so many wear inadvertently because of the culture we’re raised in. It’s important to work alongside instead of for the community.
Kim asks Nicole about what helped her recognize that it wasn’t her job to save people, but rather to be in a supportive role. Nicole shares that in Arizona, she naturally shed that layer because what she thought she knew she didn’t know and she had to understand the history and structure of the culture and community where she was working. One particular event at a food drive distribution for the families in the community where she was working revealed that she needed to ask for help but didn’t because she carried a fear of not knowing what she was doing. Her lack of cultural awareness, along with being underprepared for the event triggered a process of doing her own research and growing in cultural humility.
As Nicole shared what she learned about suicide rates and other challenges in marginalized populations, including transgendered and gender non-conforming, she had to do some of her own work around identifying her values. Kim interjects her experience around parents of gender non-conforming fearing that their child’s gender identity causing them to be suicidal and needing to clarify for parents that transgendered people struggle with depression, suicide, and addiction because of how they are treated, not because of their gender identity.
Nicole notes that this is some of what inspired her to be on the founding board of Transcend Charlotte, a non-profit that exists to promote authenticity, connection, and social justice by empowering transgender individuals and all gender diverse or gender non-conforming people impacted by oppression and/or trauma.
This work is so culturally specific and Nicole shares how important it is to know when it’s time to recognize you are not equipped to work with a specific client. This has nothing to do with Imposter Syndrome. It’s not about competence, it’s an awareness of experience, identity, and ability to connect and build trust in an authentic way.
Kim asks Nicole how she identifies Imposter syndrome in her clients and what she looks for. Nicole says she hears it in their story. For example, evidence of perfectionism and where that plays out, such as work anxiety and overcompensation that leads to burnout. She also takes clients through a few steps based on her own work, beginning with looking at their values. We all have values that are core to who we are, but we’re not always aware of them. She then helps them connect with how their values align with different aspects of their life. This is an area where Nicole can use some self-disclosure to help her clients conjure their values and then connects it all back to purpose.
Next, Kim asks Nicole to share more about Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), originating with Russ Harris. She boils it down to a simple idea expressed as,
“I accept that I’m not in a good place, but I’m still committed to the things that I value.”
Nicole admits she doesn’t practice ACT in it’s purest form, but that she pulls from many modalities that create a unique clinician identity that Kim notes is a rare find in a therapist. She believes that the glue of effective therapy is wrapping any modality in personality and love for people. That’s something you learn by practice, not something you can learn in a book. Nicole now encourages students to bring themselves into the clinical space.
If you want to hear more about Nicole’s heart for her clients and passion for her practice, be sure to watch or listen to the full 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.