Thrive Therapy Space Member Spotlight: Patty
Thrive Therapy Space LLC
A coworking space dedicated to helping mental health professionals find community, collaboration, and connection.
Patty is a Thrive member and an LPC operating her own private practice here at Thrive. While her career began in the medical field, not psychology, she has always been drawn to helping others.
Patty grew up in Erie and moved to Bradford when she got married. At that time, she was working as an EKG technician. She also worked as a scheduler in the OR, in the maternity unit as a scrub for deliveries, and as a breastfeeding consultant.
By 1999, Patty had her fifth child. To accommodate childcare, she was operating a daycare out of her home, which allowed her to take care of her kids and also make a little income. As her oldest children started to head to school and her youngest daughter showed interest in attending preschool, Patty headed back to work in the hospital.
Upon return to the field she started working in the cardiology department part-time. She picked up an additional part-time position in marketing for the radiology department.
She held both the cardiology and marketing jobs until 2009, when she got a divorce. With big life changes in the works, Patty decided she wanted to pursue a new career as a physician’s assistant (PA). She was drawn to this career because she discovered a love for working directly with people or patients through her earlier work in medicine and marketing. So she applied to Gannon’s PA program.
In 2008, Patty was accepted into the program. During that time her days went like this: waking up early and going to the gym, getting the kids ready for school, commuting from Bradford to Erie for classes at Gannon each day, and returning home to make dinner. When this became unsustainable, Patty had to consider her options, “Instead of dropping out, I changed my major to psychology,” she said.
When asked what it was that inspired this switch Patty said, “The [psychology] classes themselves led me to wanting to be a therapist. I realized how important it was for me to stay in school. I wanted to help people— it didn’t matter to me that it wasn’t as a PA.”
When she graduated in 2016 with her master’s degree, all her experience thus far had been in the medical field, though she had ample experience with people. With this experience, she was offered a job at Family Services where she worked for a year in family based mobile therapy. She described this as the hardest job she’d ever had. Entering people’s homes and not knowing what would be on the other side of the door was a challenge. She learned from that job that if there was one point of connection between herself and the other person, just one way that they could relate to one another, things would be okay.
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In 2017 she began a job at Safe Harbor, where she worked as an outpatient therapist for about 5 years. There she received individual and group supervision, and applied for her license in 2019, “my goal was to always have a private practice,” she said.
She was afraid to start her private practice, but with the support of a few friends who had already started their own, she began to take the steps toward it. She took Thrive’s Launch Your Private Practice Course which helped her get the ball rolling. She started seeing clients 5 hours a week, and then transitioned to 10 because it was hard to say “no” to people. In December 2023, Patty will have had her own full-time private practice for a whole year.
“I think the thing that has kept my clients coming back is that I can be real. I don’t pretend to be somebody that I’m not. I don’t try to do something that I cannot,” she says about the success of her practice now.
Her background in medicine and her new knowledge of mental health continue to support each other as she explores biofeedback techniques and the emotional freedom technique, which are both centered around the body.
Thrive has provided Patty the space to have a private practice in a communal setting. She said, “I would never want to be a therapist in my own office somewhere, where I didn’t have support. You need to be able to talk to somebody about what happened. If I was all by myself, how would I do that?”
Patty is an incredible addition to our community, we are lucky she is here!