Healing Pathways Psychological Services

I have received guidance and support that I could immediately utilize in my day-to-day life. I have seen their therapists at community events and they were friendly and approachable.

Leona and her team are the best. They are incredibly, courteous, knowledgeable , and go the extra mile. Leona is a very caring, empathetic person whose techniques made me feel immediately at ease. Working with them has changed my life.

Im writing as a licensed MFT and was employed as a n associate Marriage and Family Therapist at Healing Pathways Psychological Services (HPPS) from Aug. 2014 to December of 2018. Receiving supervision and professional support from Dr. Leona Kashersky, it has become clear to me it is the vision, mission, values and attitudes of any Founder/Director of an organization, that serve to limit or deepen the depth and breadth of the organizations well-being and the well-being of those it serves and the community at large.

When Dr. Kashersky and I met for the first time, I was touched by how comfortable I felt in her presence and that I felt strangely relieved as I wept privately, after my first interview, after my second interview and during the final group interview with my (then, soon to be) fellow colleagues. After recently recounting this story to a friend of mine who works in IT, he quipped something to the effect that, only in the fields of psychology and Marriage and Family Therapy can one cry during a job interview and not only is it likely this will be viewed as normal, but it may even help ones chances of getting the job! As it turns out, my grief helped me get the job and maybe not for the most obvious reasons.

Upon reflecting on this grief, it later became clear to me, that I was experiencing a deep and felt sense of psychological and emotional safety, during my brief interactions with Dr. Kashersky and those whom I would later serve among. Creating psychological and emotional space occurs for oneself, when one continually does ones own inner work and learns to create emotional safety around ones own unhealed issues. Doing this for oneself, naturally communicates a felt sense of emotional safety for others, addressing similar unhealed emotional and psychological issues. Ongoing interactions with Dr. Kashersky, reflect to me the value and importance of honesty and kindness when interacting among all organizational staff and clients, teaching me a quality of service I have learned as constancy.

It is clarity of purpose and a daily tending to it, in all our interactions, that form the mission and values of HPPS as one expression of love in action. Carrying out the mission and values of HPPS, included my role as the Outreach Coordinator and required that I be willing to extend myself in community service and outreach coordination within our community, as a way to demonstrate our care of self, care of our clients and the support of our community in which we all belong. It is our dual focus of maintaining a commitment to our own healing and growth and being of service, daily, that helps us embody and evolve the vision, mission and values of HPPS with constancy and invited us to see what blocks us in our service to others and in our commitments at HPPS. I was invited to see the relationship I had to my own healing process and the quality of my service to others and how they interrelated and worked together and promoted self responsibility for my own healing and growth process, both personally and professionally.

As for me, the overlap in my personal vision, mission and values and that of HPPS is almost indiscernible. Ive learned that the less overlap of ones own personal vision, mission and values and that of the organization one serves in, the more effective and helpful ones service will be, to both oneself and others, to the well being of the organization one serves in and to the clients of HPPS. The feeling I received from serving others here at HPPS, is one that for me is reflected in the last stanzas of a lovely poem I found in a book I read last year (2017):

...Each tree and leaf and star show how

The universe is part of this one cry,

Every life is noted and is cherished,

and nothing loved is ever lost or perished.

~ Madeleine LEngle, A Ring of Endless Light

Everyday I looked forward to serving with HPPS and I know this is partly due to my commitment to my own healing process and extending that healing in service to others. On the other hand, I know my lifes success and joy during this period of serving at HPPS, was also about my decision to honor my commitments to HPPS and its clients, tending to its vision, mission and embodying its values and the healing this commitment engenders. HPPS is a service organization that invites all its clinicians and all they serve, to cultivate integrity in ones own healing process and to unconditionally extend that healing in service to others. in my opinion, HPPS does this, while both meeting and surpassing the highest standards of practice in the fields of Psychology and Couple and Family Therapy.

HPPS embraced me, as an integral part of its evolution and has invited me and those whom serve alongside me, to do the same. HPPS mission is accomplished by providing each staff member countless opportunities to learn about service, healing and growth and to be a part of a visionary organization that confronts workplace/group dynamics (typically relegated to the organizational shadow) with honesty and kindness, keeping an ever present eye on the quality and type of commitment extended in service to ourselves and our clients and seeing both as interdependent and invaluable, to enhance the quality of our service to others.

When the day came and my learning was finished at HPPS I knew one thing lesson I would take with me, that I will have been offered an embodied example of a visionary service organization. HPPS has helped me to evolve in my service to others and I too have been helped, by being committed to be true to my role and responsibilities as a Intern of Marriage and Family Therapy and to evolve myself, in my own service to HPPS clients and colleagues, while tending the vision, mission and values of HPPS, moving me toward my own awareness and goal in life, of Selfless Service to a Shared Humanity.