Meet Brooke Sprowl of My LA Therapy in Santa Monica and Brentwood

Today we’d like to introduce you to Brooke Sprowl.

Brooke, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
When I was deciding what I wanted to do with my life I asked myself what I loved more than anything. I realized helping people was my passion. I’ve always been a very introspective person so being a therapist feels like a natural fit with who I am. It doesn’t feel like work. I love learning about myself and I’m fascinated by people and psychology.

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
As cliché as it sounds, when it comes to starting a business I’ve always seen challenges as learning opportunities. When I first started in private practice, I probably spent thousands of hours creating a website and learning about how to optimize it. After a year of working on it, I still hadn’t received a single call. Just as I was starting to question whether or not I should keep putting time into my website, the phone rang– it’s been almost 10 years and it hasn’t stopped ringing since!

Please tell us about My LA Therapy.
As a practice, we all specialize in anxiety, depression, trauma, and couples and relationships– but we offer much more than that. We have specialists in almost everything you can imagine: addiction, eating disorders, children and teens, yoga therapy, perinatal therapy, aging, panic disorder, family therapy, and more. Our primary treatment approaches are psychodynamic therapy, mindfulness, experiential therapy, and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). We find that an integrated approach, tailored to each individual client’s needs, is the most effective way to help people.

What makes us different as therapists is that we take an experiential approach to our work. We try to stay away from intellectualization– just thinking about problems and understanding them with our minds– which can be a pitfall for many therapists. Rather than simply focusing on the past or on intellectual understanding, we look in real-time at defenses and anxiety as they arise in the session. This gives us the opportunity to make interventions that are truly life-changing because we are intervening on the level of experience not just on the level of the mind. I often tell clients that if you could think your way out of your problems you would have done so already.

Changing your life through therapy is like a sport or a musical instrument. You don’t learn football in a classroom. You learn by playing. Just like a coach corrects your technique, our therapists help you practice a different way of being until you internalize that and can carry that into your life the rest of the time. It’s just like muscle memory.

We are trained to see what you’re unaware of– to tap into the unconscious– and to bring it under your conscious control. Chronic anxiety is the result of avoidance. We explore the feelings and conflicts beneath your anxiety and defenses. Once you’ve faced and resolved those conflicts you don’t have to run anymore.

I’m most proud of the quality of our team. Every member of our team is thoughtful, passionate, open, caring, and good-humored. We are really close and have a blast working together. We support each other personally and professionally, we challenge each other, and we can laugh and have fun together.

We come to each other with our struggles and use them to learn and grow as people and as professionals. I couldn’t be happier with our team and how we work together. It’s truly a gift to love the people you work with and know that you have each other’s backs.

Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
I have so many! Making fried spaghetti with my grandma and falling asleep to her telling stories. Summer lake trips sleeping under the stars, staying up laughing till after midnight, counting meteors, and talking about the universe. Making tree houses, forts, and pillow trampolines and watching the Sandlot. I could go on and on!

Contact Info:

• Address: 401 Wilshire Blvd.,
  Penthouse, Santa Monica, CA 90401

  12100 Wilshire Blvd.,
  8th Floor, Los Angeles, CA 90025

• Website: mylatherapy.com
• Phone: 310-896-5568
• Email: [email protected]

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