Kelli Foulkrod: Integrating Yoga with Psychotherapy

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This week on MIA Radio, we interview Kelli Foulkrod. Kelli is the owner of the Organic Mental Health Center. She is a therapist, yoga teacher, and mental health paradigm shifter based in Austin, Texas. For the past 15 years, Kelli has worked in the mental health field and practised yoga. She has been integrating yoga and the healing arts into traditional psychotherapy for over eight years and is passionate about offering holistic mental health treatment options.

With many years experience in an academic research setting, Kelli bridges the gap between science and spirituality. Kelli has experience serving client populations of pregnant and postpartum women, grief and loss, psychosis, homelessness, substance abuse, teens, couples, and groups. She offers individual, couples, and group psychotherapy services in addition to yoga therapy sessions, workshops, and retreats.

In the episode we discuss:

  • How Kelli started her journey as a psychology undergraduate at the University of Texas and working in clinical and academic research.
  • How working in a neuroscience laboratory resulted in internal conflict and led Kelli to interest in and research into alternative modalities alongside her psychology studies.
  • How Kelli experienced first hand the approaches that pharmaceutical manufacturers used when running clinical trials.
  • That Kelli felt that modern psychology neglects the body and she started to practise yoga and meditation alongside studying for her Masters degree in clinical psychology.
  • That, to Kelli, modern mental health therapy feels egotistical and narcissistic and that she was resistant to becoming a clinical therapist.
  • How people are hungry for alternatives but there are so few other options that people continue to get involved with mainstream medicine.
  • The profound changes that occur when becoming parents and why this might lead to mental health difficulties.
  • How we have lost touch with community and social connections that existed when we lived as tribal cultures.
  • How shamanic ceremony and tradition can be understood and utilised in response to emotional distress.

Relevant links:

The Organic Mental Health Centre

The Organic Mental Health Centre (Facebook)

Yoga for depression – the research

To get in touch with us email: [email protected]

© Mad in America 2018

3 COMMENTS

  1. Thanks Kelli and Thanks James for this fantastic interview.

    So many of the Mad in America “Severe Mental Illness Label” Recovery Stories feature the same processes.

    I suffered “medication” withdrawal PTSD and no amount of talking would have cured me, but tuning into my physical state and recognising how practical my thinking became once my feelings softened did cure me.

    In 2012 when I had a cancer scare (ocular malignant melanoma) which turned out to be true, I used the same process to stabilise myself so that I could deal (as best as possible) with my situation.

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  2. Psychotherapy is a dangerous and shameless scam, even the eclectic therapies. The basic idea is that the client needs healing.

    But this is simply a way of turning the client’s experience of injustice back onto the client. Like everyone else, the client lives in a world which is unfair and abusive. The client feels distress because their social and civil standing have been compromised, and so their survival is being threatened.

    Telling them that they need healing is just a predatory way of taking advantage of their marginalization, and turning it back against them.

    And because psychotherapy is so fraudulent, it is not uncommon that it results in suicides.

    The truth is that marginalized people, fairly or not, need to politically organize and then fight to regain their social and civil standing. This is after all the only way one can restore their biography.

    Psychotherapy and the idea of healing are just instructions in how to become an Uncle Tom and beg for pity.

    If people want to be respected and want their biography to be legitimated, then they have to engage in conflict. They must demonstrate the ability to politically organize and demonstrate skill, ability, and willingness to risk life and liberty in the defense of self and others.

    The only thing any kind of a psychotherapist will ever teach you to do is how to beg for pity and learn to live in the very small social space which the abusers have left.

    And the most dangerous thing about a psychotherapist is that they carry a government license. We must act to eliminate these licenses.

    A work in progress:
    https://sites.google.com/site/stompingthecockroach/

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