Spotlight Series

Guest Name: Kristin Hodson

Credentials: LCSW, CST, CSTS

All right, welcome, Kristen. Thank you for coming on our spotlight series for the Best in Utah Public Health. I’m really excited to dive in on things.

First, I’m going to read your bio here, just so the audience knows who you are and what you do, and then we’ll jump into all the fun questions. Sounds great. So, Kristen is the founder and executive director of The Healing Group and is the co-author of The Real Intimacy, A Couple’s Guide for Genuine Healthy Sexuality.

She has been a regular guest on Radio Wave Studio 5 and was a regular contributor on the Radio From Hell Show on X96, taking live calls on sex and intimacy. She’s an ASEC-certified sex therapist and supervising specialist specializing in sexual shame, LGBTQIA+, mixed orientation marriages out of control sexual behavior, sexual addiction, moral conflict between religion and sexuality, sexuality and grief, and consults around complicated cases to provide referrals. Kristen is skilled at helping clients who feel stuck in the relationships and sexual health find creative solutions in line with their values.

She does this by working besides them collaboratively by reflecting reflected insight, experience, and expertise. Clients often say they feel supported and safe to express and explore thoughts, emotions, and vulnerabilities, bringing about new understanding, fulfilling changes, and finding personal joy. She is a mother and wife and lives life passionately out loud.

Yes. Okay. Well, first question off the bat, what made you decide to become a sex educator and sex therapist and therapist in general? Yeah.

So my story of becoming a therapist, I don’t feel like is unique. I think a lot of therapists and healers have their own experience at some point with a therapist and experienced their own change and transformation in healing. And for, and then it can click to be like, Oh, I want to do that.

And I think we are suckers for the story and transformation and seeing people go from a place that they can’t imagine life beyond where they currently are. And I think therapists are really good at being hope holders. And so I love to be a hope holder.

And so that’s that, but you know, when I was going through grad school, I never took a human sexuality class that wasn’t required. That wasn’t offered. I didn’t even know that could be a job.

However, I, people always talk to me about sex. Like that was always, that was a normal part of conversation. It didn’t feel like anything special.

It would be one of those things. I assumed everyone’s talking to everyone about sex. And then I learned like, that’s, that’s not happening.

People aren’t talking to everyone about sex. And then I met up with someone who I really admired. It was her podcast, Natasha helper and connected with her and learn this could actually be a professional pursuit.

And that was early on in my therapeutic career. I, I started with maternal mental health after going through my first pregnancy with pregnancy, postpartum anxiety and OCD. And so got training in perinatal mental health, which that wasn’t a thing in grad school either.

After that connected with Natasha to learn about sex therapy because surprise all of my perinatal clients also were having relationship challenges that involved sexuality and intimacy. So that was really it where I then pursued my certification in it’s called a sect American association for educators, counselors, and therapists. And then have become a supervisor and just live, breathe, eat the world of sexual health and it’s intersection with reproductive and maternal mental health.

Yeah. Amazing. Amazing.

Okay. What would you say makes you different? I’m such a great question. What makes me different? It’s really hard for me to be like, I feel like everybody’s so different.

They have their flavor and all the flavors are really needed. I think my work is, I feel like in the world of therapy, what makes me different is I have this business intersection. Before I became a therapist, I also got accepted into business school.

And so I feel like I’m a social justice entrepreneur of sorts that I like to, I’ve moved from like, I still see individual clients, but I like to come up with macro solutions, meaning bigger solutions that support communities as a whole and to make systemic change. I really, when I see individual clients, they’re coming to me as a by-product of the systems that they’re operating in. So I love to problem solve and to see how business can support furthering social causes.

Yeah. Amazing. Amazing.

Okay. Moving on to the next question, leading into this would be who’s an ideal fit for you and your company to like to come in and see you guys.

Yeah. So there are a lot, it’s been really fun and fantastic to see more providers and clinics that are supporting maternal mental health. That is so needed. And I feel like the more there are, the more it sends a signal of like, Hey, this is a normal, like this is the most common complication of childbirth.

We have services for you. So I love seeing that. And same with the sex therapy world.

There’s a lot of sex therapy. We merge those. And so people that are in our stage are often those that are in their mid twenties to late forties, and they are navigating their sexuality while in the, they’re, they’re trying to grow their family and they’re navigating pregnancy loss.

They’re navigating postpartum. They’re navigating the stresses of raising teenagers. They’re navigating perimenopause.

And the, that like, it’s a huge chunk of time where you are trying to navigate your sexuality and your relationship while navigating your reproductive health and everything that coincides with that. And so we do that really, really well. We believe that every single client, no matter they’re presenting issue, they have a sexual story and somewhere in there, they have a reproductive story and we make room to weave it all in.

Even if that’s not their primary concern, it’s definitely relevant information. And for others, it’s very much a primary concern. Totally.

Yeah. Awesome. Okay.

What does the process look like to work with someone at the healing group?

Yeah. So we have a we believe every single, every single person in our ecosystem. One of our core values is an ecosystem mindset.

And we believe every single touch point, whether you are intersecting with our front desk team, our billers marketing are all a part of your healing. They’re just different facets. So you could reach out by phone, text, or email to our amazing client care coordinators, and they are going to walk you through step by step by step.

Paperwork can be kind of a slog. And so they will guide you and help you. And then they really try hard to match make you that 75% of what makes therapy successful is safety and rapport with the provider.

It’s not their expertise, though. We, we want them to have expertise, but if you, they can have all the expertise, but if you don’t feel safe with them, it’s really difficult to then want to be vulnerable. So they would get you in with a therapist, and then you could meet with them in our Salt Lake location or our American Fork location or online.

We have all of those options, which has been really a really nice post COVID gift to normalize teletherapy. We try to make getting in with us. We went through a stretch with COVID where our waitlist, like many providers, just went bonkers.

And we have problem solved that. And so now, I mean, there’s a very short, if any, most of the time we can get you in within a couple of weeks and you’re with a good fit. Challenge too, is just getting in.

It’s just getting in. Absolutely. Okay.

Awesome. And then for you in your lens within like what you guys do, what does healing or like, what does recovery look like from that pregnancy to postpartum transition, whatever your like ethos around that is. And I know that’s like a big question, a little insight nugget of like, what does recovery look like? Yeah.

I’m going to pull from Kathleen who used to have a website called Postpartum Progress. And she was, she did something that I felt like was really important, which was putting things into plain mama English. So if I were to say what our ethos or what we do is we want oftentimes the development of becoming a parent, becoming a mother, becoming a father, you are disoriented for a moment.

And you’re like, I don’t know who I am. I don’t understand where I’m at in this whole journey. I just want to feel like myself again.

I want my relationship to feel back intact. I’m feeling really disconnected. And so that journey, when someone comes in, say they’re struggling with postpartum anxiety or depression to recognize that those symptoms are symptoms of postpartum depression and anxiety, not who they are, not an indicator if they’re fit for parenthood, or if they’ve made a terrible decision, or if they’re to move them out of the good mom, bad mom to be like, oh, you’re, you’re developmentally right on track.

And we can help you, we can hold space. These are symptoms of, of postpartum depression, anxiety. And we can help integrate and help you find your identity as a parent, whether that I feel like that identity occurs, whether it’s your first or your fifth, you are, you are consistently asked to redefine yourself, because you, you’re a parent of one, then you might be a parent of two.
And that’s a totally different identity. And you keep figuring that out. So that’s, that’s really our philosophy is to help people start to feel like they’ve got a floor and grounded and that they’re not in a free fall in that postpartum journey and navigation.

Amazing. Amazing. Awesome.

Okay. What’s something that most people don’t know that you think that they should know, whether that’s about you, about your business, about mental health in general, about postpartum, like anything, any little nugget that you can give us.

That sexual health isn’t something like sexuality isn’t something you would do.

It is who we are. It’s why babies, when they are born, one of their first instincts is to go to the breast. Now we can recognize that lactation, not lactation, but chest feeding, breastfeeding can be complicated.

However, that’s the instinct of the baby and we are wired for connection. And so when we think of sex therapy, or we think of how does sexuality fit with this maternal mental health piece, it’s not about getting you back to having the sex. It’s about restoring connection and finding intimacy and touch that fills your cup and keeps you connected.

And I think a lot of parents that six week, like that six week, this is your, you now have permission to have the sex. We like to help reframe what that looks like. And I think that’s a really important myth that sex is just a behavior instead of a source of connection when we really break it down, deconstruct it and deconstruct it and make room for it.

Yeah. Amazing. What a great nugget.

Okay. Is there anything special that you want to promote to the audience, whoever’s watching?

Um, that we, we to promote, we have some amazing, I will say group therapy is kind of an unsung hero. And that was actually one of the losses of COVID.

Uh, people stopped meeting in person and stop doing kind of this group thing. But when you are with a group and you hear other people’s stories, you can see yourself in their stories and they can see themselves in your story and you create this connection. Um, we have an incredible, uh, postpartum support group.

We have an incredible postpartum therapy group that combines education and therapy. And we have an incredible women’s sex ed group, uh, because as we know, not just in Utah, but across the country, very few of us have the privilege and opportunity to grow up with comprehensive sex ed across our lifespan. So there’s a lot of things we don’t know.

So that can be a really affordable way to access services beyond one-to-one therapy, um, or they can augment your one-to-one therapy, but those are all offered online. So you don’t have to meet in person, but you get that group experience nuts. I would highly recommend those.

Okay. Very cool. Awesome.

Okay. This is the last question. My favorite person to ask is what’s the main thing that you want to be known for? Um, like as a human being, sure.

Yeah. Okay. I just want to, I want to be known for, um, being compassionate and collaborative within my community.

And that I moved in a way that I lived as though we were all on the same treatment team. Like all of the providers that are out there, we are working together to improve the health and wellbeing of everyone in our community. And that my offering is my flavor of how I do that, but I really recognize and honor everybody else’s.

And I’m really grateful for the collective community. Amazing. Amazing.

Okay. Where can we find you? Website, social media, all the things. Easy peasy.

It’s all the healing group.com or the at the healing group on Insta or Facebook. Um, people sometimes wonder if there’s really two G’s like the healing group. There are two G’s, but that’s it.

You can find us in all the places there. Great. Awesome.

Well, thank you so much, Kristen, for jumping on here. It’s been a pleasure chatting with you again, and I’ll see you soon.

Thanks for having me.