Today we’d like to introduce you to Whitney Scheef.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Whitney. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
As a child, I moved around the world, literally. My father was a mechanical engineer for a well-known natural gas conglomerate and his job moved my family every 2 years since I was 9 years old. After all of the moving around, I had not been able to establish long-term relationships that can be so crucial not only during childhood, but also into adulthood, to enable a person feel like they have somewhere they belong. One of the most crucial of human needs is to feel a sense of inclusion and belonging.
As someone who lacked that throughout the most pivotal years of development, I know what it is like to feel disconnected and lost. The one thing that helped me move from feeling lost to finding where I fit in was the time that I spent with a therapist as a teenager. They helped me to see that I could find my own sense of belonging. And find purpose out of all my experiences. They helped me to see that I could use my difficulties to help others who felt the same way that I had felt by becoming a counselor.
To make a long story short, I moved to the DFW area after completing graduate school and, armed with a degree in psychology and another in counseling, I found that the Dallas area had so much opportunity to offer.
Working in Dallas, I have gained a plethora of experience due to the countless career opportunities in the metroplex. While I completed my internship, I worked at several inpatient hospitals and outpatient clinics.
Thanks to these opportunities, I knew that my ultimate goal was to open my own private counseling practice. The day that I completed my internship and became fully licensed, I opened Positive Pathways Counseling office. Going into business for yourself is a risky step to take in anyone’s career, but I knew that I wanted to do my best to avoid the limitations that can be found in mental health treatment driven by insurance in managed care. I took a risk and it paid off. My practice has grown each year since it opened and has expanded to provide specialized counseling services to people from all walks of life. I have found that what truly matters to my clients is that I don’t look at them as just a part of a business, I care about them as individuals. I have learned that life is too short to wait around for your dream to come to you, you must actively seek out what you want without holding back. I not only help others do this, but I live it in my everyday life and lead by example. I had always wanted to help people and now, my days are full of opportunities to help those in need. I have been told that if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life. I would truly say this applies to me. My counseling office not only helps our clients find a place where they belong, but it has enabled me to find where I belong as well.
Has it been a smooth road?
I can say that I certainly had some major struggles throughout my internship. For a majority of my internship hours, I worked at a psychiatric inpatient hospital as one of the adult inpatient therapists working with patients who had been admitted for substance abuse and mental health issues. I facilitated group therapy, conducted family therapy meetings with individual clients and helped people to find aftercare when they discharged from the hospital. I found this job to be extremely stressful due to the demands placed upon me from the hospital.
I found myself working 60-70 hour weeks and being compensated very little for my time and hard work. Although I loved the patients and working with their families, I reached a breaking point and finally burnt out. I had to leave my position at the hospital and began working in their outpatient program, which was much less stressful. I felt like such a failure when I had to step out of the hospital setting. I want to remain as positive as possible in saying this, however in my experience, the managed care settings driven by insurance has made the treatment of mental health issues very difficult. As an inpatient therapist, I never felt bogged down by patients, but by the paperwork required by insurance to ensure that the hospital stay was paid for. For each patient on the hospital unit, so much documentation was required that I felt like I spent most of my day writing notes and documenting. I truly felt this took away from the quality of care that I could provide to my patients and, this truly bothered me as a mental health professional. I was working 60-70 hours per week because I forced myself to meet the documentation requirements and then pushed to be able to give each patient the time and care they needed. This was a recipe for burn out. Now, in a private practice setting, I find that 95% of my time can be spent with clients and the documentation is much more reasonable. I no longer feel pressured to complete mountains of documents for insurance companies and I feel like I can provide the best care possible for my clients.
So, as you know, we’re impressed with Positive Pathways Counseling – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
Positive Pathways Counseling is a private practice counseling office in Bedford, TX that provides client-centered therapy services to those in need of professional counseling. Something that is unique about therapy provided at Positive Pathways that the client drives the direction of each therapy session. A client-centered therapist tailors each counseling approach to fit the unique needs of the client being treated. As such, I do not push my beliefs, ethics, or opinions during therapy sessions. This open-minded environment enables people seeking therapy to feel comfortable being themselves during sessions. I find this environment is best suited to creating lasting therapeutic change. There is no judgement and, as such, people can feel comfortable being themselves. I do not think there are many places left in today’s world where people can feel comfortable with their own authentic selves. This is one of the things that my clients most often compliment me on.
I also do not accept payment from insurance and, as such, I am able to offer my clients with 100% privacy of their mental health treatment. As a private pay therapist, I do not have to discuss treatment progress with an insurance case manager who has never met my client to determine how many more sessions they will need to “get better”. As such, my services are not limited by insurance guidelines and session coverage. I am able to treat clients for as long as they feel they need therapy, not for the duration of their sessions covered by a 3rd party payment system.
I have worked with all types of clients throughout my counseling career. I am a Certified Clinical Trauma Professional. To hold this title, you must obtain a certification from the International Trauma Association that requires me to obtain annual trainings geared towards the treatment of traumatic experiences. I have found that a vast majority of individuals seeking counseling treatment have experienced some degree of trauma in their past. This extra training has prepared me to help clients identify where traumatic experiences are affecting them in their daily lives and enables me to teach them to overcome these difficult experiences. I find that my experiences working with trauma is a benefit to all clients seeking my counseling services. I also have a great deal of experience working with families and troubled children. Most of my experiences throughout grad school working in nonprofit community counseling centers were with children and adolescents with behavioral problems and their families. As such, I am very familiar with family dynamics and have a broad understanding of how families operate as a system. This helps me to teach families new ways of operating and working together to create positive change for the family as a whole, not just one identified patient or person within the family. This also works well with couples in marriage counseling.
Let’s touch on your thoughts about our city – what do you like the most and least?
I love the DFW area for the many opportunities that it has to offer. There is never a shortage of career opportunities and the metroplex offers endless ways for any professional to expand their professional experiences. Dallas also offers an array of things to do with your personal time that provide opportunity for personal growth. I have never lived in a city that offers so many different activities. From photography classes to dance lessons, I have never felt there is a shortage of things to do with your time in the DFW area.
There’s not much that I don’t like about Dallas. I think that most people would agree with me that the hot summers can be difficult to bear at times. I thank God for air conditioning. I also am not a fan of the traffic.
Otherwise, I love Dallas and feel that the traffic and heat are minor issues when compared with all the positive things this city has to offer.
Pricing:
- Counseling Assessments for 1.5 hours cost $125.00
- Counseling Sessions for 1 hour cost $95.00
Contact Info:
- Website: www.positivepathway.org
- Phone: 682-206-9205
- Email: whitneys@positivepathway.org
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/counselingbedford/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/positivepathlpc?lang=en
Getting in touch: VoyageDallas is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
