Today we’d like to introduce you to Amee Velasco.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
It’s interesting; one of the main roles I fulfill in my work as a psychologist is to hold space for others so they can tell their story. But when I’m asked to talk about mine, I don’t know where to start! But I’ll try my best.
Speaking of stories, some of the more notable parts of my journey involve telling stories. Maybe it’s because I was an only child for the first four-and-a-half years of life. It was the 80s, so there was no real internet or fancy devices to keep my attention. All I had was my little brain and the imagination that poured out of it. According to my parents, I told stories about everything I laid my eyes on. Even after I started school, gained a pretty solid social network of friends and my brother was born, I always came back to my stories. I’d spend hours and hours hammering out “novels” on our huge PC. I think I counted one of my novels to be 70 pages long!
I also had a knack for listening to other people tell their stories. During my middle school and high school years, it meant hearing other people vent their problems to me or getting in on the latest gossip. The type of social networking that young girls are conditioned to do. At some point, adults started to want to talk to me about their problems as well. And these weren’t everyday high school gripes. These were adult issues that, in hindsight, were not healthy for a young girl in middle school or high school to hear. I was still trying to understand what boundaries were, for crying out loud. But I’d sit there on the couch, “actively listening” to these grown-up stories.
I didn’t get my first whiff of what’d it be like for someone to listen to me for once until high school. As with other kids, I dealt with some bullying in one of my favorite classes and made the decision to drop the class. I made an appointment with my school counselor and as I was walking to her office, I expected to withdraw from fourth-period Symphonic Band and enroll in another course. Pretty simple, right? I can’t remember exactly what happened in that room, but at some point after telling her about being bullied, the counselor said, “Wow, that must be really hard for you.” And boom! A seed was planted. At the time, I didn’t know what was quietly germinating inside of me, but as I progressed through college, psychology was the only thing that piqued my interest. Although I loved listening to people, I never planned to become a psychologist until I learned that you really can’t make a living with a BA in psychology. After doing a little more research on professional degrees and clinical programs, I finally decided on earning my PsyD, a Doctorate in Clinical Psychology. In 2003, I began the program at the California School of Professional Psychology at Alliant International University in San Francisco.
The decisions I’ve made about my career have been more or less organic. I always leaned toward what felt intuitively right for me. My emphasis on women’s studies and multicultural/community mental health was a reflection of my close relationships with the women and girls all throughout my life as well as being raised in a very diverse community in the San Francisco Bay Area. And as much as I treasure my time in the Bay, it was my undergraduate experience at UC Santa Cruz that validated my strange, quirky ideas and sense of feeling like I don’t fit in. It emboldened me to choose the paths that were less safe but were filled with abundance, fulfillment, and joy (and let’s be real, they were also filled with fear and anxiety). It’s where I met my equally (if not more) strange and quirky husband, Dr. Wayne Kao. He doesn’t just choose the less safe path, he creates his own.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Smooth roads aren’t real. They’re concrete-poured manmade pathways that don’t resemble anything natural in life. So, no, it hasn’t been smooth. On paper, it might’ve looked that way: good childhood went to college right after high school, went to graduate school right after that, got a doctorate, married college sweetheart, co-founded a mental health community practice with husband. The end. It’s what my Filipino mother calls “The Order.” But the internal struggle is a completely different story. The smooth road everyone sees is really the result of a coping mechanism called Assimilation, a process my immigrant parents went through to survive living in the United States. They were teenagers when they came here from the Philippines, right smack in the middle of one of the most challenging developmental periods any person can go through. With them, they brought along the silent baggage of familial and historical trauma, namely centuries of Spanish and American colonization in the Philippines. I won’t go into the complex effects of what colonization does to a people, but combined with family trauma, this messy concoction of lived experiences manifested in a kind of low self-worth that is invisible yet eats away at a person like cancer. However, it was palpable enough that it got passed on to me. If you’re familiar with ancestral trauma, you’ll know what I mean when I say that I inherited a whole lineage’s worth of unhealed wounds. I was the first-born child of parents who were the oldest children in their respective families.
To top it off, I am also the oldest grandchild on both sides of my family. It wasn’t until adulthood that I realized how this position in the family came with a set of high expectations. I’ve always considered my parents to be some of the most intelligent people I know and often wondered why they didn’t accomplish as much as they could have. It later dawned on me that I was the vehicle to carry out those goals, intentional or not, and it set the foundation of what Western psychology calls “enmeshment.” I described this to one of my therapists as “the feeling of not knowing where the other person ends and I begin.” For a second-generation Filipino child such as myself, there is a very blurry line between the phenomenon of enmeshment and the concept of collectivism where an individual’s decisions, image, success, etc. are based on benefiting the collective. Example: when I graduated college, my parents kept my diploma and displayed it in their home. They wanted to keep my doctorate diploma as well, but firstly, I wanted to display that in my private practice office and secondly, it was my achievement!
The smooth road that looks good on paper began to show its wear and tear. As a kid, it was smaller things: freezing during a solo at a band recital, having a mild meltdown when I had to pass out Valentine cards in class, dropping ballet class after learning I would have to perform in front of people. But as pressure continued to mount, they became bigger things. After college, I had what I can only assume is self-diagnosed alopecia areata and I lost all my eyebrows. Some months later, out of the blue while I was at a training at work, I got what I initially thought was a heart attack and later learned from the ER doctor that I had a panic attack. “Are you anxious about anything?” he asked casually, scribbling notes on his notebook. Without thinking, I answered, “No.” I glanced over at Wayne and I swear, if his eyebrows raised any farther off of his face, I would’ve thought he was mocking my own hair loss months earlier. At that point, I was working four mental health jobs, determined to pay for bills and rent and, yes, build an impressive resume for my graduate school applications.
You would think that would’ve gotten me to slow down a little and reflect on this experience, but as any good Asian would do, I pushed on. Make no mistake; this growing anxiety was becoming quite paralyzing. During my first year of graduate school, I couldn’t get past the first stage of training at my practicum site because of performance anxiety. Luckily, I was already in therapy, a requirement for many psychology graduate programs, where my very first therapist taught me a visualization technique to push past the anxiety. On my first attempt, it worked and I completed the first stage of training. I filed away this magical experience, which would later become the starting point of my clinical specialization in mindfulness and treating anxiety.
Going to therapy became a relatively stable mainstay throughout the years, even after I completed the therapy requirements for my doctoral program. And still, the anxiety persisted. Another notable manifestation of my anxiety was the beginning of an ulcer which I thankfully treated early on. But I think one of the peak anxious experiences I’ve had was right after I graduated with my doctorate. I’ve mentioned the familial and historical trauma that I was carrying with me, but there was also the existential dread that was slowly developing during my training. It was modeled to me throughout graduate school a very specific profile of how a professional psychologist should be: very proper, and academic, with very strict boundaries about how to interact with clients and colleagues. This did not fit my personality or the cultural norms of social interaction that I grew up with. I could write a novel about this, but coupled with the trials of enmeshment, this escalated into somewhat of an identity crisis. During one of the most vulnerable years of my life, I found myself at a postdoctoral site where I felt completely unsupported and was ultimately pushed out of the organization. Gone were the hopes of collecting postdoctoral hours, my sense of dignity, my sense of self-worth and value. On the day I drove away from that job, my husband’s mentor called me and told me to pull over because I had been sobbing so hard it was as though my heart had fallen out of my chest and onto my lap.
Needless to say, my inner tumult that had so ungracefully tumbled out into the open had transformed the smooth road into this dusty, dirt path littered with stones, boulders and inconspicuous potholes, all tarnishing the smoothness of my earlier assimilation. I can’t remember at what point in time the thought had occurred to me, but I decided one day that I was tired of allowing anxiety to overwhelm me this way. I spent the better part of a year practicing mindfulness techniques daily. Until one day, I noticed that things didn’t bother me as much anymore. The healing was extremely gradual, anticlimactic with no fanfare or opening of the sky and a chorus of angels singing their praises. No. But I had found myself to be in a place of peace that I had never been before.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Plainly stated, I am a licensed clinical psychologist specializing in mindfulness and treating anxiety, depression, trauma, addiction and pervasive mental illnesses such as schizophrenia or major depressive disorder. Since 2012, I have worn many hats, including psychotherapist, supervisor and professor, and have spoken at various professional workshops and panels. Throughout my training and work as a psychologist, I’ve worked with women and a number of diverse populations, including the Asian American, African American, Native American, Latinx and LGBTQIA+ communities. In recent years, my focus on diversity has progressed to include decolonization work in which I work to integrate indigenous approaches to healing. Finally, I currently serve as the Diversity Chair on the Board of Directors for the San Gabriel Valley Psychological Association (SGVPA), our local chapter here in LA County.
However, none of these titles capture just how sacred this work is to me. I’ve described myself as a guide, ushering clients toward the wisdom they already carry within themselves but have been buried by layers of self-doubt, social conditioning and trauma. If I may be a bit more romantic, I can also see myself as a little like a midwife for people’s stories, assisting them in birthing their authentic selves. I am equal parts a mirror for and a witness of people’s inner world. I function as a means for one to see themselves and for them to be seen by another. If you’re sensing a little bit of a spiritual component to my approach, it’s because it’s there. For me, part of decolonization in therapy is guided by my own earth-based spiritual journey and reclaiming of my indigenous Filipino roots. This has naturally led to me integrating opening and closing rituals in therapy sessions for some clients as you would in a ceremony.
Perhaps that is what I’m most proud of when it comes to my work. I’m definitely proud of the many projects and events I’ve participated in over the years, from winning the Alice F. Chang Award for my doctoral dissertation on Filipino mail-order brides to organizing this year’s diversity conference for SGVPA. But I would have to say that my proudest feat so far has been practicing psychology in ways that are genuinely and authentically reflective of who I am.
I see the field of psychology as being in its adolescent or young adult stage of development. For better or worse, it’s a relatively new field and continues to encourage the more buttoned-up version we see on TV or in movies, where therapists speak in scripted tones, wear business casual attire and view clients as needing to be “fixed” or “cured.” And while I don’t disagree with most of these characteristics, it’s difficult for me to identify with any of them. I tried it and it didn’t work for me. In my personal experience, wearing masks usually has an expiration date. After many years of trying out different professional paths within the field of psychology, my husband and I left our 9-5 jobs and started our own community practice, a hybrid of private practice and community mental health approaches. We opened Healing Rhythms Mental Health in 2019 and haven’t looked back. It’s within this space that I’ve found the freedom to integrate my love for writing, art, community and diversity.
In the past several years, I’ve written a mindfulness tea journal, held space for monthly tea ceremonies, and compiled creative submissions from members of the Filipino community into a zine which I sold to raise money for mental health services during the pandemic. All the while providing psychotherapy services with as much cultural sensitivity as I can. Now that the pandemic is naturally coming to a close, the following chapter in my professional career involves bringing people together through fundraising projects and community events. For any budding mental health workers out there, if you were told there is only one way to be a healer, they weren’t telling you the whole story.
Can you tell us more about what you were like growing up?
Being an only child for the first four years of my life, I lived inside my head a lot as a kid. I was the hero of my own stories. My imagination was intentionally nurtured by my parents through arts and crafts, playing musical instruments, dance, reading and writing. I feel blessed to have had a childhood that didn’t involve any devices, not even TV. It was well understood that watching TV was almost always off-limits, a rule that lasted until the end of high school. While my internal world was colored with confidence and success, my real life was a messy continuum of ups and downs, joys and many insecurities. I felt most comfortable in small groups with close friends and crumbled under the pressure of having to do anything public. Oddly enough, the grandchildren on both sides of my family were almost required to perform at family functions, a tradition that many Filipinos can relate to. It’s a way to contribute to the celebration. So, while you won’t see me basking in the center of attention, I will not shy away from line dancing at any wedding reception. It’s in my DNA to perform; however clumsily it may be.
That tradition carried through most of my younger years. I started playing piano and clarinet in elementary school and continued on into competitive band all throughout middle school and high school, taking on my first leadership positions ever, such as Band Historian and co-captain of our percussion team. Dance had less of a presence during my childhood, but it’s still a prominent memory that spans years of my upbringing. While ballet wasn’t for me, I found that my body and mind resonated more with hula dance, an art form and cultural practice that is prominent in Filipino culture, particularly for Filipinos whose families were born and/or raised in the Hawaiian islands as mine are. In the same way, participating in sports embeds the value of teamwork and discipline; engaging in dance and music as a group not only nurtured my creativity and appreciation for art but it ingrained in me the importance of community and belonging.
All of these early achievements should’ve boosted my self-confidence, but what felt more palpable was the growing weight of expectations, and it showed in the way I enjoyed my time behind the scenes and balked at being in the spotlight. Unbeknownst to even myself, I had found my own quiet ways to rebel, toeing the line between purposefully doing poorly in school (for many years in elementary school, I was known as one of the “smartest” students in my grade) but doing just well enough that it wouldn’t disappoint my parents — despite getting low grades for a period of time in high school and almost not getting into college, I still ended up graduating with honors.
I was often in a state of being “in-between.” As an adult, it eventually translated into indecisiveness, one of the more common characteristics of anxiety. In addition to academic uncertainty, I also found myself in-between social groups, finding myself in a typically “nerdy” group such as a high school band, but also being on the fringes of the “popular” crowd. In a way, belonging, but not quite. It could explain why I felt so much more at ease in college, hanging out in Santa Cruz with the hippie types. I found that my peer groups were a lot more fluid, with room to explore outside convention. As I mentioned before, I believe it was that experience that really gave me “permission” to color outside the lines and tell stories that were authentically and undeniably my own.
Pricing:
- $180 per session
- Sliding scale
Contact Info:
- Website: www.drameevelasco.com
- Instagram: @the_healing_journey
- Other: www.healingrhythms.net
Image Credits
All images are personal photos from Amee Velasco
