ORLANDO, Fla. – This week on “Black Men Sundays,” host Corie Murray interviews Caitlin McDonald, a licensed medical mental health counselor and qualified supervisor for mental health counselor interns.
Trained in eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, a form of therapy well known for treating post-traumatic stress disorder, McDonald has a private practice working with children, teenagers and their families.
“It helps individuals to kind of deal with something from their past — whether it was something stressful, something that was very overwhelming, something traumatic — and what we do is we work through some of those experiences in a very safe and comfortable setting in the therapy room and that allows individuals to heal from any of those past wounds in order to live in a more successful, adaptive lifestyle in the present and hopefully moving forward into the future,” she said.
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While she was still a student at the University of Florida, McDonald said she was drawn to medical mental health counseling from a personal standpoint, having been the friend that others would often come to for advice.
“Health is so much more and involves our mind, the way that we view ourselves, how we take care of ourselves in a much bigger (way) than our physical self. It’s extra, extra important, and research has shown very recently that just being open and connecting with yourself and knowing yourself allows you to handle the things that life might throw you, whether it’s the loss of a loved one or family issues, your own personal struggles, it’s important to be able to have a safe place where you can talk about those things, get support for those things,” she said.
McDonald is also the coordinator of the CHILL program, aka Community Help and Intervention in Life’s Lessons, which provides individual and group counseling in Winter Park’s secondary schools.
“What we do is we offer individual family and group counseling to the students for free of charge. We’ve been around for 20 to 30 years, in these communities, in the schools, having licensed therapists on these campuses to support the students, the parents, the teachers,” she said. “It’s a program that I love, and I’ve seen how much it impacts kids and families in our area.”
From 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. on Tuesday, July 9, the CHILL program and the Winter Park Health Foundation will hold a family fun night at the Center for Health & Wellbeing along Mizell Avenue.
“It’s a great, fun, indoor program (where) we have lots of games, activities, just a kind of fun place for families to get out of their homes, do a little connecting, checking in with themselves, whether it’s learning about how to how to take care of themselves a little bit better or just connecting with their family members,” she said.
Hear the full interview and more in Season 4, Episode 25 of “Black Men Sundays.”
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