Dr. Allison Brownlee, Founder and Clinical Director, Stronger Together Community Services

We understand that Stronger Together focuses mainly on mental health and wellness through individualized health practices. Could you perhaps start by giving us a brief introduction to Stronger Together as of today?

Stronger Together Community Services is a community-based mental health practice. We specialize in seeing individuals, couples and families and run support groups. A unique aspect of Stronger Together is that our care is really individualized. So people come in for services and do an intake assessment screening. We really get to know what’s going on in their lives, and then we match them with a therapist who would be a best fit for what they’re going through.

We don’t use a one-size-fits-all approach to therapy, and because of that, we use a variety of different types of practitioners, healing practices and therapy models to ensure that we’re providing the most effective services for each client based on their unique needs.

And what would you say have been the keys to the success of the organization?

First, we have a really strong team. We spend a lot of time, energy and effort building our internal community. So we make sure that our therapists are well-educated and taken care of. Their needs matter as well. Oftentimes clinicians don’t necessarily get the time and attention they need for their own mental health and well-being. So we really tend to take care of our clinicians. When you have a strong clinical team, then you’re able to provide quality therapy. And so it’s sort of a trickle-down effect of having a strong team. We’re able to resource to one another and get the support that we need so we can take care of our patients and their mental health and well-being. So that’s been a really important key to success. 

The other part of this is that we are very, very well trained. We spend much of our budget on training and education to ensure that the therapists who provide care to our clients know what they’re doing. When they feel skilled, they feel confident. Our clients then get better, and they see improvements in their lives. Their anxiety and depression are reduced, and they feel more connected in their relationships. 

When people start to feel better, they also like to tell their friends and family about it. So, our clients become our biggest referral source because of the success that they see with their mental health and well-being. So, that’s sort of how we’ve built our therapy and business models, and that’s really helped us to be successful.

You offer different services and therapy support groups. You also mentioned professional services, corporate wellness and couples therapy. Could you perhaps give us an overview of your different services?

We offer individual therapy, which involves you, an individual person, and a therapist talking about issues that are going on in your life. You might be dealing with difficulty at work, feeling overwhelmed by the challenges of work, finding life balance or something else. You just have the space to talk about what’s going on for you. 

Couples therapy is for people in relationships where both members of the couple see a therapist. We talk through the dynamics of the partnership and the challenges that they’re encountering. Then, we tailor the therapy to the specific nuances of those dynamics.

We help people reduce conflict and increase connection, and we generally work to build a stronger foundation so that when they encounter issues in the future, they won’t always need a therapist to help them resolve them. 

And then, we offer support groups. Specifically, we have built a community around like women’s empowerment. So, helping women come together and build community with each other and finding ways to practice, like building self-esteem, increasing their confidence, being able to reduce their anxiety and then also finding friendship and genuine connection with each other. We find that people can feel really isolated and not really sure how to build a connection or community. These are opportunities for people to take risks, make friends and feel more socially comfortable.

The last piece is corporate wellness. We visit other businesses and give them tips, techniques, tools and presentations on how to improve the mental health and well-being of their workforce. So, it helps with conflict management, self-care and work-life balance, as well as being able to practice emotion-regulation skills at work. Generally, this builds morale and increases productivity, making for happier employees. That generally brings more success for the company or the business because their employees are being tended to and supported with what they need in their own mental health.

For this feature, would you like us to focus on any specific area or service, or would you prefer us to discuss all of them?

I think corporate wellness may make the most sense in terms of being able to provide people accessibility to using Stronger Together services, but I think all of them are important. I think the readers at Newsweek would probably be most interested in what they can do to help their employees be more productive or help their company grow. So bringing in somebody who has a mental health background or an expert in relationships, whether they be interpersonal or work relationships, can really help your company to be more productive and also increase the quality of work that people are doing when they’re not overly stressed. And they’re taking out their stress on one another, and there’s conflict and all this kind of stuff. 

Having a happier, healthier workforce is better for everyone. It also helps with employee retention and lower turnover. So that’s what we’ve seen with our practice when we go into businesses and help their teams.

You mentioned the importance of having a strong clinical team, and they receive constant training. Could you tell us a little bit more about the innovation and latest training that you are taking on?

The practices that we implement with our clients on our team and with businesses really help people understand their internal world. They become familiar with what is causing them to react or behave in difficult ways, or they notice that they’re engaging in problematic behavior, like being angry or having anxiety attacks, and they’re not quite sure why. 

So we’re really an insight-driven model, where we’re looking at what’s happening from you for you, from like a body-based perspective. You start to notice that your heart rate is increasing. You’re having trouble breathing. Your fists are tightening, or you’re getting hot. We really work with what’s going on for you at that moment, what’s activating your nervous system and identifying what is in front of you.

But we also look at how your own history relates to something that’s happening in front of you, unconsciously reminding you of the trauma you endured as a child. The way that you’re yelling at me, or the way this conflict is happening in this relationship, feels so scary because it’s exactly the way that my mom or dad used to yell at me as a kid. And that there’s something familiar here that we feel we have to protect ourselves against even though it’s not really happening at the moment. 

We’re in a conflict. You’re not my dad, and you’re not my mom. But somehow, my brain and my body take me back in time. And now I’m behaving in ways that don’t make sense in our current context. So, I might be yelling or screaming at work, which is completely inappropriate. But it’s the only way that I know how to be heard, the only way that I know how to get attention to the problem that I’m having. 

So, we really work with people to understand where the behavior is coming from. And how can we start to heal the older wounds like what happened in other circumstances so that you don’t have to use those behaviors or strategies in our workplace. That can look like aggressiveness, shutting down or avoiding. It could be a team member who doesn’t respond to emails or show up to meetings, or we’ll constantly say yes to everything to make the boss happy, even though it’s really problematic for us. So, these are issues that we might find in the workplace, but they come from somewhere important.

So, our work, the training we provide and the therapy we provide help people get to the root of the issue. We don’t just stop saying yes or, because we know this is a problem, fill out a worksheet and change our thoughts or behavior. We really get to the core issue.

This also reminds me of a book I read recently. I don’t know if you are familiar with Ray Dalio. He is similar to Warren Buffett. I think he is the owner of one of the biggest funds in the US, Bridgewater Associates. He recently wrote a book called “Principles.” He explained that in his company, every employee has a document about their personality that is accessible to everybody. It can get quite personal like Allison is an out-of-the-box thinker, and then there are negatives, like Allison doesn’t perform well under pressure, or does perform well under pressure, things like that. And it was quite an interesting concept. 

It’s important because we all have different personality dynamics. And I think we can build a workplace that’s emotionally safe enough to talk about our strengths and our areas of challenge. We can better tend to one another and support one another if we know that you or I have a hard time working under pressure. Then, perhaps we can look at solutions to that. That can be a different timeline for things or the way that we communicate about a deadline. Ultimately, responding to somebody’s needs and supporting them makes them feel more connected and engaged, and it also increases their ability to perform at work.

You know, if you respond to something I’m sensitive to and I know that you care about me, I’m far more likely to engage and really commit to my workplace. And so I probably produce more and better quality because I’m not being shamed or punished or fired for my sensitivities. They’re actually being embraced, and they’re being used as a way to grow. So I also feel invested in because you actually care.

Is there anything that we haven’t talked about that you would like to mention?

The only other piece is that we’re a nonprofit mental health agency. That’s important because being a nonprofit allows us to build in a lot of this training and education. It allows us to access more individuals in our community, and it’s just an important part of our business model that I didn’t mention in the beginning.

I have two more questions. One of the last questions is: What is the key message that you would like to send?

The key message that I would like to send across, which I think is important, is the idea that we need to invest in our own mental health and well-being. However, we also need to take an interest in investing in the mental health and well-being of the people who are important in our lives. Today, we can be so separated and feel so disconnected. I think using what we know about each other and our understanding of one another to build connection and community is as important as being sensitive to each other and kind to one another. 

And my last question, Allison: What is your vision for Stronger Together Community Services in the next three to five years?

I would love to grow and expand our services outside of California and be able to have practices in other states so that our business model is more accessible to other people. Growing just being able to serve more people, a diversity of individuals, couples, families and building communities outside of just our own would be a goal for us.