Exploring Life & Business with Molly Johnson of Convergence Trauma Therapy

Today we’d like to introduce you to Molly Johnson.

Hi Molly, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I came to the world of therapy by way of being a 16-year-old who was being asked all the time, “What are you going to study in college?” while simultaneously trying to keep it together while my parents’ marriage was falling apart. I decided that I wanted to help others and be a couples and family counselor. Even though I decided this career path out of a place of pain, amazingly, it has been the best gift to me.
I got my undergraduate degree in Psychology from Central Christian College of Kansas, and after graduating went immediately to Friends University (at the time in Lenexa, Kansas) for their Masters in Marriage and Family Therapy program. During my Masters degree was when I began to soften and realize that I don’t actually have the answers and can’t fix things for other people, as much as I might want to.
I moved to several places before landing in Phoenix. I got trained in EMDR in 2019 and my own life and work has never been the same. I am so thankful to be able to help people move through their trauma into a place of healing. I still work with couples, but the majority of my work is working with individuals who have experienced trauma, whether that be from childhood, sexual assault, medical trauma, or unhealthy relationships. The work I do with individuals helps them to be better in their families and to their partners. In this way, all the work that I do helps the entire system, even when I’m only working with an individual, instead of a couple.
My own story includes some medical trauma, as well as autoimmune diagnoses and infertility, which is why I love working with women who have experienced similar things.
In case you were wondering, my parents ended up staying together and working through their own stuff (without my help). It took them a lot of years to become stable. It’s a wonderful story that brings me hope. They credit their work in therapy, as well as the book “How We Love” by Milan and Kay Yerkovich, who based a lot of their book on the concepts of Emotionally Focused Therapy and Attachment Theory.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Just being a human means that things aren’t smooth. The journey of life is always taking me places that I didn’t expect and wouldn’t have chosen, and yet I do see the divine intervention in the struggles along the way.
For me, the struggle of infertility was a big one. I had and have many clients with children, and I also have clients who also struggle with fertility. My clients don’t necessarily know what struggles I’m going through, and I don’t share unless it’s relevant. I had many clients become pregnant unexpectedly or unwantedly even while I was struggling to conceive. It’s not easy to sit with that, but at the end of the day I would be grateful that they felt safe enough to trust me with their struggles, and I made sure to have good people and a good therapist myself with whom to share my own struggles. We ALL need help in different ways.
Even when life continues to happen for me, as a therapist, my job is to show up as consistently and honestly as I can with my clients, and provide a safe space for growth and healing. When I’m having my own struggles it can make it harder but also it can help me relate to the pain my clients are going through, and gives me more respect for the whole process.
Also, in case you were wondering, after 5 years of miscarriages and different diagnoses, and surgeries, we were able to have a child. Not everyone gets that happy ending, and I don’t take a single day for granted.

Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I work with women who are feeling stuck in bad cycles in their relationships. These are brilliant women who know better, but keep doing things that they know aren’t working, but they can’t help it. (It’s because their bodies are responding to threat cues in the environment, and their bodies are overriding the cognitive parts of the brain.)
I’m proudest that my business prioritizes healing outcomes over consistent revenue.
Because I work intensively, meaning that people can get months worth of therapy done in one session by scheduling longer sessions, it allows us to move through material quickly.
I also don’t require any specific frequency, so I allow clients to choose how often they schedule or if they want to just wait and see how things feel after an intensive, then that’s fine too. Many of my clients will go months without seeing me, and then just pop in for an intensive to work on something specific that is coming up for them. I think that my therapy practice is one of the most flexible in terms of scheduling frequency. Some of my clients prefer the 50-minute weekly therapy appointments, and some like to change it up and do a 2-hour this month, a 50-minute session here or there, and then a 3-hour session if something big comes up. I can make it all work.
Also, if someone has a primary therapist, I’m happy to provide supplemental EMDR sessions to help them through stuck points. It is one of my favorite things to collaborate with other therapists to provide the best care for clients.
Finally, I love working with other therapists or other health practitioners! We also need to get care for ourselves and I’m privileged to get to do this work with others in the field.
I am so thankful to have the privilege of offering very personalized options for each individual client that comes in. There is no “one-size-fits-all” for healing, and there shouldn’t be for scheduling either.

Do you have any advice for those just starting out?
If you are just starting to think about therapy, my advice is to shop around for a therapist. Read their blogs. Call them for a free 15-minute phone consultation, make sure that you like their vibe. Your connection is way more important than their credentials. Of course you want them to be competent in several modalities, so you can ask about that, but most of all make sure that you can relax in their presence. I wish I knew that I didn’t need the “smartest” therapist, I just needed the one that would connect with me, so that I could connect to myself better. It would have saved me some time and money.

If you are thinking about starting a private practice, just know that you don’t have to do it the way everyone else does. You bring something unique to the table, and there will be clients that will jive with exactly that. I’m weird and quirky- my clients know that half the time I will take my shoes off and sit criss-cross applesauce on the chair across from them. That helps them feel comfortable to do what they need to do to be comfortable in my office. Whatever you need to do to bring your best self, do that, and it will help your clients to do the same.

Pricing:

• I offer free 15-minute phone consultations to see if we’d be a good fit.
• I offer educational book groups for low-cost that can be found on my website here: www.convergencetraumatherapy.com/groups
• Sessions are $250 per 50-minute session, or after the first 50 minutes, per hour.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.convergencetraumatherapy.com

Image Credits
Becca Johnson