Today we’d like to introduce you to Vanessa Kellner.
Hi Vanessa, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
Wholesome Healing is the destination at the end of a windy, at times seemingly fragmented and tangential path; the result of many converging story lines in my life.
The facts are deceptively simple. I started the LLC in 2012. I opened the doors of the practice in 2016. I moved into our current location in 2018… and have expanded in two big bursts since then, bringing the practice to where it is now. What started as a solo practice with just me, is now a group pediatric mental health practice, encompassing a team of phenomenal clinicians, serving as a training center for graduate internship programs, and operating as a continuing education provider for other mental health professionals.
The evolution of the practice, and of me, since 2012 is much less linear, however. In this time, so much has happened. I became and have grown as a mother…. as a wife… and most of all as a person.
I became and have grown as a play therapist and as a play therapist supervisor.
I became and have grown as a business owner and leader.
And in all these areas, I’m still growing. Ever becoming.
Each of these paths individually and collectively have impacted Wholesome Healing, making it what it is today… a practice that I could not be prouder of. A place built by a collection of people who all have in common a deep love of children, and a gift for seeing the world through the magical culture of childhood.
Wholesome Healing started as a dream, formed into a vision, and has become a physical space. One that embodies the essence of Child-Centered Play Therapy (CCPT), the modality that grounds our practice and is the foundation on which Wholesome Healing has been built. We may be whimsical and playful, but we are rooted in serious research and theory that has been proven to be effective. We would have it no other way.
Every design choice, service offered, and decision made has been considered with intention and integrity – ensuring adherence to the CCPT model and always honoring the needs and rights of children and families.
I have never been one to accept good enough, not for myself, not for my family, and not for my practice. The families we serve deserve excellence. They deserve the best in services, atmosphere, and presence.
Families come to us hurting, stressed, and worried; carrying guilt and fear for the wellbeing and functioning of their children, their most precious people.
They entrust us with all of this. They entrust us to care for their children’s mental and emotional health… to help them with their hardest things… and I will never take this honor for granted. I will never stop growing as a clinician, supervisor, practice owner… and person, so that children and families who come to us can feel seen, heard, understood, and cared for – at the highest level.
This is the standard to which I hold myself and my team. We have the highest trained and credentialed play therapy team in the county, if not the state. But most of all, we have the best people. I am person-first in all that I do, and I have been so blessed to have found the most beautiful people along all of my paths. From our designer to our office managers, to our team of incredible therapists… Wholesome Healing attracts and exudes passion, inspiration, integrity, and quality. It’s weaved into all that we are.
I didn’t know what this practice would be in 2012 when I started the LLC. But I knew I wanted it to be a physical space, and I knew how I wanted that space to feel. The feeling is hard to put into words, but you know it when you step in the doors. You feel it – the intention, the love, the hope – for all that can be healed, cultivated, and made beautiful.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
In some ways the road has been smooth… mainly in the people I have found along the way who seem meant to do the work they do. People whose gifts, skills, and passions have conspired with my visions – bringing the practice and my ideas to life in ways I could not have even imagined. The journey has felt very serendipitous in its unfolding – with doors and opportunities opening at the right time, allowing me to grow and expand steadily.
In other ways, the road has been very hard. I was a brand-new Mom when I started Wholesome Healing, trying to heal myself so that I could create a blank slate for my own kids and not project my own challenges and hurts onto them. I did not know when I started down the road to Wholesome healing that my own children would face struggles that would require me to take that healing and growing to even higher levels – in order to be able to be there for them in the ways they needed. Learning how to parent a child with anxiety and neurodivergence, supporting my children through medical traumas and illnesses, and attending to the (often conflicting) needs of three children in the midst of all this – has resulted in me being a better clinician and has elevated Wholesome Healing by informing the services we offer to families, many of whom face the same challenges. Our Parenting Intense Kids program was built from my experience of parenting my own intense child for over a decade, the lived experience one of our clinicians had of being an intense child, the similar experiences of many of our clients, and over a year of research. We created this program to address the overwhelming response of parents across the world who read my raw and real blog, where I recounted my own experiences and professional thoughts, and shared how alone and unseen they felt in their journey as a parent trying to help their child. We turned struggles and pain into knowledge and healing through this program – for all of them.
Being a parent who has spent many hours in waiting rooms of pediatric specialists also led me to be extra intentional about each aspect of our space. I know what it’s like to be a working Mom waiting during a child’s appointment and to have other children to entertain and care for while one child is receiving services. All of these experiences led me to create a space that is welcoming and nurturing – for parents and children who are waiting, as well as for the children being seen for services with us.
The other struggles that have met me on the road to Wholesome Healing being what it is today – in hindsight I can see were gifts. Losing my lease in the original space led me to the space we are in now. Colleagues leaving left me with a bigger lease to assume and more space – forcing me to grow even when it was scary. Early hires that did not go well taught me to be patient and wait for the right people – to not simply seek out and accept checkboxes on a resume. I learned all along the way to trust my intuition – that feeling I was searching for, that I was seeking to create… I would find that in people too. And boy did I. When I shifted from the goal of hiring therapists to a vision of a team of professionals who elevated the practice, women I could learn from and who would challenge me to keep growing and stretching in new ways, women who I could admire and be in awe of – that is exactly what happened.
I have learned to follow the feeling of my visions and to leap through the fear and uncertainty that building an inspired business brings. Jumping off a cliff without knowing what lies at the bottom may not seem like the best business advice, but it has worked well for me and following that feeling has been like a thread that has brought the paths of my life together, brought visions to life, and drawn the right people to this practice… I wouldn’t do it any differently.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about Wholesome Healing?
Wholesome Healing is a pediatric mental health practice, specializing in the use of play therapy approaches to help children and families with a wide range of mental health, emotional, and relational needs. We provide developmentally appropriate therapeutic modalities that have been well researched and have ample evidence behind their effectiveness. We don’t practice from a whack a mole approach that tries to address surface behaviors or symptoms – we focus on the underlying challenges that are contributing to what we see at the surface. We get to the source.
Our providers are all highly trained and credentialed, skilled in selecting the approach that is most appropriate for each child / family – and then practicing that approach with integrity to the protocol. This means there is a “why” behind everything we do – and that our therapists are incredibly grounded in their work. It also means that we see meaningful and lasting change for families who commit to this process.
<b>How families benefit/how we support families</b>
Families who come to us for help are getting a bottom-up evidence-based approach that changes the way their child feels and functions – long term. We have services that address all the various needs of families – from parenting education and support to infancy and early childhood attachment, to working with teens and young adults…. and of course our primary specialty, helping children through play therapy.
As a pediatric mental health practice, we don’t just care for children – we care deeply for the parents holding it all together. We offer Circle of Security Parenting Groups (COS-P) that specifically focus on helping parents with children 0-6 years of age. We also offer the Trauma Resiliency Model to help parents process difficult birth and/or postpartum experiences. We have several incredible parent-child approaches that we offer as well, including Theraplay®, Child-Parent Relationship Therapy (CPRT) and Filial Family Therapy, all of which help strengthen the parent-child relationship while also teaching parenting skills.
Our Parenting Intense Kids program is something we created – based heavily on research and clinical experience – as well as the lived experiences of many parents and kids. We have beautiful testimonials of parents who have come through this program and shared stories of finally feeling understood and helped.
Another very important area to highlight is our social skills groups. We have spent YEARS searching for the most effective approach to therapeutic groups for children. We didn’t just want fun groups – but groups that provided a space for kids to experience the same transformative change with peers that clients get individually through Child-Centered Play Therapy (CCPT). Our therapeutic social skills groups are rooted in the Child-Centered Group Play Therapy model and also incorporate other directive approaches to target skills like social reciprocity, perspective taking, communication, conflict resolution, listening skills, kindness and sharing, teamwork, and flexibility/adaptability. Our amazing providers have created our Social Safari and Mighty Minds programs to help kids connect with others in new and fulfilling ways. We have seen SO much success with these groups – with many graduates who initially struggled to connect with others leaving with friendships made – and the skills to make more authentic friendships out in their lives.
I’m most proud of the integrity with which we practice at Wholesome Healing. We offer the best in pediatric mental health counseling, and we are constantly striving to ensure that stays true. It was always my dream and vision to have a practice with clinicians who were not just good but excellent. Clinicians who raised the bar for me and for the practice as a whole – and who I would trust my own children to see. As part of this vision and mission I wanted to be a practice that had a team of therapists who all held the specialized credentials required to be a play therapist. Many practices say they provide play therapy, but most if you look have either few or no providers who hold the credentials necessary to call yourself a play therapist, and the specialized training and supervision that backs those credentials and enables clinicians to practice play therapy with the highest quality, integrity, and accountability.
In contrast, we at Wholesome Healing have a robust team of amazing providers – all of whom I deeply respect and am continually learning from. Each of our providers holds at least one specialized play therapy credential – some multiple. We also have credentialed play therapist supervisors on staff, contributing to the ongoing education, guidance, and support of our team. Other practices cannot say this.
This why we intentionally stay small – so we can preserve the quality and integrity in our care to children and families and in our practice of play therapy.
We love surprises, fun facts and unexpected stories. Is there something you can share that might surprise us?
What many don’t realize is that I never wanted to work with children! When I was in graduate school I specialized in organizational counseling and wanted to work in big companies, helping with corporate culture and working in a consultant role. After graduate school I got a job at Johns Hopkins, working in substance abuse as I accrued clinical hours for licensure. I left Hopkins within a year after my first daughter was born – turns out I didn’t want to be a bad ass corporate Mom with other people raising my child. News to me. Motherhood turned my world inside out. It changed everything for me. As soon as I held my daughter in my arms I knew there was no going back… and while I did go back to Hopkins part time after maternity leave, there was still not enough flexibility in that job for me to be present for my daughter in the way I wanted to be. So, I left Hopkins and took a job in community mental health. It was through this job that I started working with children, by necessity, and realized I loved the pediatric population, but also that the work I was doing with children through more cognitive and behavior-based approaches felt like it was skirting or missing the root issue(s). It felt too surface level. I knew I was missing something, but I didn’t know what exactly kids needed or how to provide it for them.
Cue 2015, when at the urging of a colleague, I took a Child-Centered Play Therapy training with Dr. Garry Landreth in DC – the rest is history. That one training changed the course of my career, and my life… because being a Child-Centered Play Therapist is not just about the work we do clinically with children, it’s a philosophy of being in relationship that has changed how I am with others, and most of all, greatly influenced me as a parent.
Once I discovered Child-Centered Play Therapy, my vision for Wholesome Healing became clear to me…. the wellness center I had dreamed of in 2012 became a play therapy center for children and families… and one year later to the month – the doors of the first Wholesome Healing location opened.
Having and growing Wholesome Healing while also growing as a mom has not been without challenges, but it has given me the freedom to adapt and adjust to each stage of parenting, allowing me to show up for my children in the ways they needed me, when they needed me. I have been able to include my children in the building of my business and to use my skills and knowledge as a play therapist to better support and provide for my children and their needs as their mom. It has and continues to be, a beautiful merging of paths.
Although I own the practice, it is very much a family business. My children have been a part of each phase of growth since the beginning. My husband runs all the finances and is the grounding force to my constant leaping. And our family pet Max is the emotional support (soon to be certified pet therapy) dog for the practice, supporting kids sometimes through snuggles and sometimes with just his presence. It’s the greatest gift to have found a way to bring the most important people and parts of my life together with me through Wholesome Healing’s journey.
There is nothing more important than protecting the childhoods of children and supporting them as they grow into who they are meant to be. It’s the absolute greatest work, at home, and at my practice.
<i>You see a child play, and it is so close to seeing an artist paint, for in play a child says things without uttering a word. You can see how he solves his problems. You can also see what’s wrong. Young children, especially, have enormous creativity, and whatever’s in them rises to the surface in free play.
– Erik Erikson</i>
Pricing:
- https://www.wholesomehealingforall.com/fees
- https://www.wholesomehealingforall.com/internship-program
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.wholesomehealingforall.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wholesomehealingmd/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wholesomehealingmd
