Get to Know Dr. Laryssa M. Creswell, LPC

What are you passionate about when it comes to therapy?  

I am passionate about the women and teen girls that I serve really knowing their power and their inner strength. Oftentimes, they come to me when they’re at their lowest. To be on that journey with them to either discover their power for the first time or rediscover it—that's what brings me back every day. I see them get to know themselves on a deeper level and then feel like they can walk out into the world and not be afraid of it.

This is my belief: When there is uncertainty or lack of clarity about who you are, what you like, what you want, what you need, what is okay to do either to you or around you—when that is missing, you're left susceptible to being swayed all over the place. The world can take over you when you don't really have a clear point of view of yourself. Everything anyone says sounds like something you should do or not do. 

Too much of that, you get lost in it. You don’t know what’s right, what’s wrong, what you want for yourself. There’s nothing to combat or push those viewpoints away. 

When women and teen girls know that there’s another way to be and to feel, that you can speak and have this power, they show up in the world differently. Whoever’s path they cross has a different experience of them. It affects people individually but also entire communities. 

What type of clients or areas do you specialize in working with?

I’m building a trauma-focused practice. Childhood trauma is where I've been settling. Clients who’ve experienced childhood trauma or sexual trauma, such as sexual assault/abuse or rape, seem to find their way to me. 

When I think about individuals who have experienced trauma, I am wanting them to feel their power, have power back—that’s the exact opposite of what trauma is. Trauma makes you feel powerless. Finding or rediscovering your strength is what drives my work. 

How do you believe change happens for a client? 

Change happens when the desire for change is there and effort is put forth. They have to want it. I'm not the one that's going to do the work. 

Clients already know the things they need and want. They are experts in themselves. Often the change is just me pointing that out, then clients realize, “I already know this” or “I've been doing this thing. I used to do it differently and I stopped somewhere down the road.”

The process is about bringing those forgotten things forward, returning that strength to them. And then sometimes, we’ll introduce new tools, new skills, or new ways of thinking about the old thing. We can merge the old ways with the new. 

All of these happen in the therapy room, so the last part is clients putting it into action—putting it into play in their home life and their community. That’s when change starts to stick.

Are there any modalities or approaches you feel attached to?

I recently went through the Internal Family Systems (IFS) training and I loved it. I appreciated the process of the training which was to go through it myself as a way of learning how to use the technique. 

EMDR [Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing] is another one that I love using. I think the two of those really work so well together. Those are the two modalities that I lean on but of course, what I use depends on who's in front of me and what their needs are.

IFS really spoke to me because I often feel different parts of me that want to do different things. Maybe there’s a part of me that wants to achieve things but another part of me is scared, hesitant, and unsure about those next steps. IFS puts language to us being made of parts that develop based on our childhood experiences. Those parts form to protect our inner child or the “exile” as it is called in IFS.

In our external families, such as mom, dad, sister, brother, grandmother and so forth—they each take on roles. We have an internal family system similarly, too. When we unburden that inner child, the exile, all of these parts of ourselves don’t have to play the roles they have taken on anymore, leaving space for self-energy. IFS informs the way that I hear my clients speak.  

EMDR has minimal talking. Your brain is doing all of the work. When working with someone, sometimes clients can become stuck in the EMDR processing. With the lens of IFS, I see a person getting stuck as having a protector that has jumped in to protect them. So now we have the ability to acknowledge that part and ask it to step back. We understand it’s concerned about something and let the part know that it’s okay. We’ll come back to it. That way, we can keep going. 

That’s how I’ve experienced these approaches working well together. It informs the way I hear the client speak. 

What inspired you to get into therapy?

I started off in music. I wanted to be a performer and then I quickly realized that I didn’t want to perform but to teach. After doing some student teaching, I decided that wasn’t for me, either. But I loved music and wanted to continue to do music in some capacity. People also would always come to talk to me and work through their problems. 

I learned that I can help people and still use music by way of music therapy. I am a board-certified music therapist. I practiced as a music therapist for the first 15 years of my career then moved into counseling, and I received a doctorate degree in counseling psychology. 

I love music therapy. I loved working with people and seeing the transformation that happens through the use of music. Working with people who didn't have the words to speak to their experiences or their emotions and using music to support them to be able to express that through the music. To witness that process happen without words, it was amazing. 

I felt like I needed more verbal skills so that when people were verbal, I would be able to really work with that, so that is why I went back to school for counseling. Those two disciplines work really well together.

What is your favorite local resource to share with clients?

It’s not specific or local but the resource that I like to share is acupuncture. For whatever reasons they have, many of the clients that I see don't want to take medication. Some do, some are on it, some are okay with it but I have many that don't—and that's fine. I always share with them the possibilities of acupuncture and how that can be a really helpful tool in their journey. I don’t want to say it works “in place of” medication but it can be a supporting factor in the work that we're doing. 

What is the best therapy-related article or resource you’ve seen recently? 

It’s not an article but on Instagram, the.holistic.psychologist. Her posts are amazing. She has a great way of phrasing some of what my clients and I work through in sessions. Sometimes I'll screenshot her posts and send them to clients and say, “This is what we were talking about today,” because she will be saying the same thing but in a different way.

I also got her most recent book and I have found it to be a good resource. It’s called How to Meet Yourself by Dr. Nicole LePera. She has great exercises that I think are very useful. 

What is your favorite way to practice self-care that you’d recommend to other therapists? 

I recently started going to a chiropractor and that has been amazing. I've heard different things about chiropractors. I was always afraid of going but I've been following a doctor on IG. Everything they were naming in their posts, I could feel it in my own body. So I started going, and it’s been the best thing ever to just release and have my body to be realigned. To experience my body not hurting is amazing. 

I do trauma work. The trauma lives in the body. As a clinician we are the keepers of these oftentimes horrific stories, and this can live in our bodies. For the work with my clients we are not just focusing on what you remember, but what is stored in your body as well. I needed to do the work to address what is or has been stored in my own body. 

The work that I do is really heavy. However, I’m a light-hearted person. Where appropriate, I always find a way to use humor naturally. While meeting with a client, she was bawling. In a moment she said something and in return I said something that was light-hearted humor and suddenly she’s cracking up while tears are coming down. 

What’s the last book you read or what book did you read recently that you would recommend to anyone?

Many people have already read this but The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. It's really reader friendly, whether you're a clinician or not. It provides a lot of answers for clients. 

Why did you choose to use UpLift?

When I was coming into my own practice, I was trying to figure out a way to have a private pay practice but still provide services for people who couldn’t afford private pay. 

I met with a Growth Associate, and he explained to me how UpLift came to be, how UpLift’s goals were about trying to make it easy for not just the client but also for the clinician. I loved the concept of the two being able to connect.