Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: This is not the type of work that I'm thinking that I'm going to retire from at 60. The great thing about being a therapist is the older you get, the better you get, as long as the mind is still working well. So I was really intentional with the choice.
[00:00:18] Speaker B: Welcome to skin deep. I'm Dr. Ana Chacon, and today we have a very special guest joining us. Get ready for some expert insights you won't want to miss.
[00:00:30] Speaker A: So I'm Christina Algeciras, and I'm a psychotherapist in private practice. Have my own business.
I started my own business in 2008. I had had a corporate career in international logistics, and that wasn't really kind of what my heart was set on doing. I kind of fell into that career and I did well professionally, but it was extremely stressful and not really something I was particularly passionate about. It was more that I was good at doing my job.
And I had been an art student prior to that. Had really moved away from my creativity. And I was in my late 20s when I was really feeling like the career that I had was not sustainable and trying to figure out how to do something else. I was really was working really long hours. I had a lot of responsibility. So was really difficult for me to figure out how to leave the job that I had. And something that really was very supportive to me throughout my life and something that I had been introduced to as a teenager was yoga. And the meditative, introspective, Eastern philosophy kind of practices and views were something that I found myself really constantly coming back to in my life. My first yoga class that I went to, my mom took me to that. And it was a class at Miami Dade and their continuing education program. And I was probably 13 or 14.
And I remember being in the end of the class, in the final relaxation and really feeling resting, like the idea, like an embodied sense of rest and peace.
And it kind of stuck with me. And so throughout my journey, I found myself always coming back to yoga and sort of that was very supportive to me in terms of leaving a workplace that was really quite toxic and unhealthy for me as.
As a person.
And I left that job, took a sabbatical and traveled a bit in Southeast Asia, traveled a bit in Europe, and was.
Because I really had a professional burnout. Absolutely. And after taking that sabbatical, I was still somewhat unclear as to the direction I was going to take. But I knew I wanted to help people and especially help people that felt stuck in their lives and were feeling extremely stressed. I Was working in New York at the time I had been living there and I started working an admin job at one of the investment banks to just kind of figure out what my next steps were. And that was 2008, big recession and it wasn't sustainable for me to continue to live in New York. And I also didn't want to go back to the industry that I had left.
So I moved to Miami and basically started my life over again. I trained to be a yoga instructor and right after that trained to be a children's yoga instructor. My mom had had the idea that I might enjoy working with kids, which I really was surprised by. I mean, I liked kids well enough, but I didn't feel like I was called to do that. But I had some interactions with different people who work in the space of creativity with children.
And that was really magical to be witness to.
And so, you know, I thought I'd give it a try. And I started teaching children's yoga first and taught children's yoga and eventually started teaching more adults. In the end I was teaching ages 3 to 99. I worked with young kids to teaching in nursing homes. So I really had quite a broad population that I was working with.
And at that time I started my business teaching yoga. I did a course on health coaching. So I was really trying to bring a holistic view of well being to children and adults, including healthy cooking. It was the time of Jamie Oliver and his movement in terms of teaching healthy cooking in schools. And I was really inspired by that. So I taught some children's cooking classes, I was teaching them yoga. And my approach with yoga is really very much from the emotional intelligence and philosophical standpoint. The movement aspect of it for me is important or was important for me as a teacher, but it was secondary.
It was really to under help people to feel good in their bodies, to be in relationship with their bodies, to be in relationship with their emotions. And as I continued on that path, I myself went and started therapy.
And I think I needed some clarity as to what my next directions were going to be for myself in my life and in my business.
And in that I had come to the conclusion that I. I felt that it would be good for me to go back to school and train as a therapist.
A lot of what I was encountering with some of my yoga students, I felt like I wanted to be able to support people in a deeper way beyond yoga.
And I felt like I needed, you know, more information, training and what have you. So I went back to school. Was a long journey Because I never finished my undergraduate degree way back when. So I had to finish that. And yeah, I went back to school, I think I was 36, to finish an undergrad and very much with my focus to get my masters and add psychotherapy to my business.
And what happened from there was that I finished school, my master's in December of 2019 and my plan had been I'll keep teaching and slowly build my therapy practice. And we all know what happened in 2020. So that sort of ramped up very quickly. And since I have stopped teaching yoga in 2022, because at the time I was teaching virtually and really sort of missing that in person component and just the way that my practice developed, I really wanted to focus more on the psychotherapy aspect of my business.
So that in a nutshell is where I am now.
[00:08:37] Speaker B: Was it difficult at your, you know, after having like a whole other career
[00:08:43] Speaker A: just at your age?
[00:08:44] Speaker B: I just say this because I've been in school for or I was in school for so long, Dr. And I would hate to go back to school again. But was it difficult? What do you have to say to people who maybe are considering a career change, like who are older?
[00:08:59] Speaker A: The difficulty was really for me, building my confidence that I could do it. It was something that I thought about for a long time. I mean, I was always very academically oriented.
So it did feel for me like quite a failure the first time around that I didn't finish school. And that was a lot for me to work through.
And I think that sort of getting over that mental hurdle once I got past that, I mean, I was just single minded in my focus. Like I knew what I wanted and just plotted ahead. It wasn't easy.
I was working at the time as well. It wasn't easy. But you know, I think when you know what you want, like you make it happen. Your priorities.
You know, I stopped going out as much. You know, my, my social, sort of, my social life did take a bit of a backseat, but I felt okay with that because I really, I was working towards something that felt incredibly meaningful to me. And you know, to go back to school for an arbitrary reason, it's going to be a challenge to stay motivated.
But if you are clear on what you're doing and why you're doing it, I knew that this was work that I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I was pretty clear on that. This is not the type of work that I'm thinking that I'm going to, you know, retire from at 60. The great thing about being a therapist is the older you get, the better you get, as long as the mind is still, you know, working well. So I was really intentional with the choice. It was definitely difficult, but I was sort of going through the motions in the sense of, like, these were the things that I would have to do in order to build the kind of professional life, the vocational life that I wanted to build. And so, you know, I dealt with, you know, learning things that weren't particularly interesting to me, but anything I really tried to gear, you know, every assignment I had, every paper, every reading, anything where I had some autonomy in terms of the direction of study, I really tried to gear towards my future practice.
A lot of the research that I did, it was, you know, researching yoga and mental health, things like that, or embodied practices or embodiment practice, somatic practices and mental health. So everything that I was interested in or had to do, I already had an interest in. So it makes it easier in that regard. You have to make sacrifices, but I think that's part of life. And, I mean, I did better. It was amazing to me. I did better in school as a, you know, older student than I ever did as a younger student. And I think it's because I had a different level of focus and dedication.
[00:12:25] Speaker B: Did you. I don't know if your parents are still alive, but did you have support from family, friends? Did you feel like Carrollton were a support group in your career who kind of supported you throughout this process, or did you kind of do it all on your own?
[00:12:40] Speaker A: What got me into the airline industry or international logistics was a family business, and I didn't stay in the family business, but I stayed in the industry.
And it was something that people in my family, they recognized I was sort of on the burnout track.
Friends from Carrollton were also, you know, kind of like, this is crazy.
So I think a lot of people in my life did recognize that maybe this was probably not going to be the most fulfilling path for me. And, you know, know, I stayed in it for a variety of reasons. And when I left that job, I had definitely, you know, emotional support from my mom. My mom was really supportive. She's, you know, I would say, pretty unconventional as well. My mom also had different careers in her life, and, you know, came to this country as an immigrant, came because of the work that she was doing at the time. Both of my parents are immigrants. They both came for different reasons.
So both of my parents were supportive of me finding what was the right fit for me. There was not really a lot of pressure. Oh, you decided on this and you have to stay doing this for the rest of your life.
And I would say that my friends also were supportive, incredibly supportive of me leaving my old job. It was really emotional support, you know, that I, that I got.
And when I moved back to Miami, I moved back into my mom's house and I was there for, for many years. And you know, my.
I have a sister.
She, my mom, my, my friends, you know, different people in the community, they were helpful for me, you know, played different roles, mentoring me and helping me. I don't know if it's staying motivated, but just, you know, kind of helping me stay afloat emotionally. It was definitely challenging.
And then when I went back to school, I met my current partner and he was really supportive of me going back to school too. So I think that overall, I mean, I don't have kids, but overall everybody was like, oh, this is tough and you can do it. I mean, in regard to financial support, I didn't really. I. No, I wouldn't say I really had financial support.
I worked, you know, student loans, all the things that we have to do and the sacrifices that we have to make. But I don't regret any of that. I mean, really, a big part of what was incredibly helpful and continues to be incredibly helpful for me in my life in terms of my growth, is I go to therapy. I have a long relationship with my therapist. I mean, I now do psychoanalysis. And it has changed my life completely. It is because of going to therapy that I went back to school, that I had the space and the support to figure out what did I want for my life and feeling okay to feel scared and do it anyway. I mean, I tell my own clients that I work with, we're waiting for the right moment to do something. We're going to keep waiting. If we're waiting to feel ready to do something, we're going to keep waiting. We're never going to feel totally ready to do anything, especially when it takes what puts us outside of our comfort zone. When we're in our growth edges, it's not comfortable at all.
And I think it's really helpful to have people in your life that recognize that you're in the growth edge, that things are challenging, that things are difficult, but that they have faith in you.
And that is one of the most meaningful things, is to have somebody that believes in you. Yeah, than you. That is just. That is life changing. Absolutely.
[00:17:32] Speaker B: How about your practice today? I don't know if it's common in what you do to take insurance, you know, how did you find running it, running a business? I don't know if you've run a business before. And then where do you get patients from? Like where do you, how do people hear about you, Things like that.
[00:17:50] Speaker A: One thing that helped me when I established my business is the Small Business Administration.
I did some workshops with them. They have a lot of free or inexpensive workshops. You know, it's this, it's a national organization and in South Florida they have a division called score.
So they have, you know, these workshops first starting a small business. They help you with sort of understanding what legal entity is best for you, those types of things. So I had guidance there. And because I worked for both a family business and then, you know, private corporation, I had a facility with a business. I understood budgets and the way that a sort of a business functions and that a business has licenses and these types of things that I think for a lot of people coming out of counseling program or a psychology program, graduate schools, they don't teach students, I'm sure probably medical students either about the business side of and industry.
So that was definitely an advantage that I had in terms of understanding certain aspects of just business.
So those things were very helpful.
And because of my, I guess what I had been learning in school and the feelings that I have about managed care and the healthcare industry as a business, I knew that I did not want to take insurance. So I don't take insurance.
There are therapists that take insurance. There are therapists that don't take insurance. I don't believe that an insurance company should dictate my clients care. I work in a very holistic way.
The standard that an insurance company is looking at is generally behavioral therapy, which can be without a doubt helpful. But it's not my theoretical orientation. It's not the way that I practice.
I'm really interested in helping people get to the root of things.
And that takes time.
[00:20:31] Speaker B: How often do you see patients? What is your. Is it in person, is it online?
[00:20:36] Speaker A: So I see people in person and virtually, I would say the bulk of my clients is word of mouth. Probably 70% of my business is word of mouth. And the rest will come to me through Google or Psychology Today or what have you. I view my practice as very bespoke. You know, it's very much about building a relationship with the people that I'm working with. I work with people who have chronic health issues. I work with people who, you know, are dealing with anxiety, people that are dealing with depression, people that are dealing with trauma, people that are dealing with in intergenerational issues, intergenerational trauma. The immigrant story is also a big thing that I work with with my clients. I think that's, you know, significant, especially here in South Florida.
So we, you know, we have diverse populations. And I think that what I tend to see is the first generation of the immigrant, they are working to get settled and make a better life, and they don't have really the time to process their experience, especially if it was a traumatic experience of immigration.
I feel that who I work with is usually the second or third generation who is carrying some of that experience of their parents or grandparents and how that affected them or continues to affect them. And yeah, that's you know, the work that I'm doing is it's diving into the unconscious, making conscious what is unconscious that's building awareness. That's how we stop living on autopilot, SA.
