117: Healing the Helpers: Emotional Labor, Boundaries, and Community with Kara Cruz

In this episode of A Simple Therapy Podcast, Sindee Gozansky unpacks the overthinking so many therapists experience but rarely discuss openly, tracing it back to perfectionism, fear of causing harm, and countertransference. She offers a few gentle shifts to soften the loop rather than suppress it: naming it out loud, separating reflection from rumination, leaning on supervision, and trusting presence over performance. 00:00 - Welcome to the Podcast 00:48 - Naming the Therapist Overthinking Spiral 02:31 - Roots of Overthinking 05:59 - Shifting Out of the Loop 08:40 - Reflection Versus Rumination 11:17 - Letting Supervision Hold It 13:22 - Permission to Be Human

In this episode of A Simple Therapy Podcast, Sindee Gozansky talks with Pam Skop, LMHC, CEDS, and founder of EveryBody Psychotherapy NYC, about eating disorders, body image, and what recovery actually looks like once you get past the surface. Pam's own eating disorder went unnoticed through her teens and twenties, even in therapy, because no one ever asked her the right questions — an experience that now shapes how she trains therapists to check in about food and body with every client. Her central reframe: an eating disorder is not a weight disorder, and disordered eating usually isn't a problem to eliminate so much as a protector to understand. Together, they work through what that looks like in practice — simple, non-shaming intake questions modeled on how clinicians already ask about sleep, the role of curiosity over advice-giving, and why "you look so healthy" can land as harder than helpful. The conversation moves through the cultural pressure driving harder relapses right now, from GLP-1 messaging to 15-second social media clips to the perinatal period and bounce-back culture. Pam shares what healing can look like using deeper somatic and IFS-informed work of reconnecting people to their bodies. 00:49 - Meet Pam Skop 02:53 - Pam's Personal Recovery Journey 05:19 - What Gets Missed, and How to Ask 10:23 - Redefining Recovery and Its Protective Roots 13:30 - Misconceptions About Bodies and Diagnosis 16:00 - Why This Cultural Moment Feels Harder 20:09 - What People Wish Others Understood 24:38 - Signs of Healing and Flexibility 26:01 - Somatic Work and Reconnecting to the Body 29:06 - Perinatal and Postpartum Body Image 36:42 - Nourishment and Resources for New Parents 39:02 - Building EveryBody Psychotherapy NYC 40:58 - Interns and the Next Generation of Therapists 46:24 - Taking Risks and a Message for Anyone Struggling 49:22 - Where to Find Pam

In this episode of A Simple Therapy Podcast, Sindee Gozansky talks with Randall Avery, CFP and owner of Deasil Wealth Management, about the part of private practice ownership most clinicians were never trained for: money. Randall built his career in corporate financial planning, but it wasn't until a therapist friend described the impact of her work that he found the "soul" missing from the numbers. His central reframe for the conversation: every practice owner is quietly running two sets of books, business and personal, and most therapists have only ever been taught to ignore both. Together, they work through what it actually looks like to build financial competence without shame. Randall walks through the natural progression from spreadsheets to QuickBooks to a bookkeeper, breaks down the retirement account ladder (SEP IRA, solo 401K, SIMPLE IRA), and shares his rule of thumb for cash cushions. Underneath the mechanics, Sindee and Randall keep returning to the emotional core: the shame clinicians carry around money, the training that told them profit shouldn't matter, and how staying "on offense" rather than reactive can quiet a lot of that anxiety before it starts.

In this episode of A Simple Therapy Podcast, Sindee Gozansky talks with Lacey Kelly, LCSW, therapist and author of The Process of Unbecoming: A Different Relationship to Being Human. Lacey didn't arrive at this work from theory — she'd felt an existential ache since she was a kid and spent years working through self-help books, trainings, and her own therapy practice before landing on the question underneath all of it: what if the thing we keep trying to fix was never actually broken? The two of them work through the core premise of Lacey's book — that we're all born whole and worthy, and that the patterns we hate about ourselves are evidence we once protected something valuable, not proof something's wrong. They get into how adaptation and personality form together in childhood, why that makes our protections feel like identity, and why capacity isn't a skill to build but something we already have and just lose access to. Lacey talks through how she brings this premise to clients who are deep in shame without invalidating what happened to them, why shame can actually be a doorway into feeling connected to other people, and what she tells clients who relapse and feel like they're back at square one. Sindee and Lacey also get into something bigger — the loss of a shared "third" that used to hold some of this weight for us, and what's filled that gap instead. Lacey closes with a message for therapists and helpers specifically: watch for the urge to fix the person in front of you, because it quietly reinforces the very belief you're trying to undo. Her bigger point lands simply — nothing is missing from you, and remembering that is the whole practice.

In this episode of A Simple Therapy Podcast, Sindee Gozansky welcomes Katie La, a licensed professional counselor and supervisor whose work is grounded in trauma-informed, culturally responsive, and justice-oriented care. Katie came to therapy not by design but by what felt like destiny—a near-full scholarship tucked inside her graduation diploma pulled her into a field she hadn't planned to enter. What grew from that unexpected beginning was a deep, decades-long commitment to meeting clients where their histories actually live: in culture, in survival, in the parts of themselves they were taught to dismiss. Sindee and Katie cover what it really means to bring your whole self into the therapy room. Katie shares openly about growing up as a Vietnamese refugee in Houston — the shame of feeling not American enough, a household where emotions were never named, and a culture built around physical survival rather than feelings. That background shapes everything about how she works with clients today, especially those from minority and marginalized communities who carry guilt just for having a mental health struggle at all. The conversation moves through validation as the only real starting point, the difference between projecting your lived experience onto a client and letting it make you more attuned, and why curiosity is a more powerful clinical tool than any certification. Katie also pushes back on the self-regulation-only model most therapists learned in grad school, making a quiet, convincing case for co-regulation — community, culture, karaoke with friends — as equally necessary for healing. This one is for any therapist who has felt the pull between their training and their humanity. Katie's perspective is expansive but her delivery is grounded and real, and what stays with you is something simple: the most important thing you can offer a client isn't a technique. It's the willingness to walk alongside them — not ahead, not behind — and not look away from what's true.