Hello it's nice to meet you! My name is Stevie Sandy and I am a 25-year old graduate student living in Oakland, California. My graduate school is the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco where I am completing my Doctorate in East-West Psychology. I just recently finished my MA in East-West Psychology and obtained my certification as a Spiritual Counselor from the school. It took so much to get me to this point! Let me rewind. I grew up in Southern California in the Inland Empire under the care of my mom and stepfather. My biological father was in and out of jail and prison for my childhood because of drug abuse. My mom and stepfather also struggled with various addictions, but they were able to conceal it much longer. When I was a freshman and high school, my parents lost our house because of their addictions. I was houseless and stayed with friends from my high school, left in some sort of limbo. I was stuck in that limbo for all of high school, really struggling to ground anywhere. I put all my focus into school and extracurriculars. It was something I could afford and it distracted me from the chaos around me. I knew if I could get into a good college, I would have a chance. I attended the University of California, Santa Barbara for undergraduate where I double majored in Global Studies and Religious Studies. I loved my studies. They have always been the most consistent part of my life. They grounded me while the world around me was still extremely unstable. During my undergraduate years, my biological father's addictions took his life unexpectedly. It forced me to confront my upbringing and grieve deeply. I finished my undergraduate degrees during COVID-19, which allowed me the space and time to grieve while still having my studies to balance out my time and energy with. After undergraduate, I spent some time working at the university, considering what graduate program I might be interested in. It was during this time my older sister, only 31 years old, passed away from cirrhosis of the liver. She struggling with addictions, as many of my family members do. Again, I was forced to confront my upbringing and deeply grieve. It was these experiences and many more that shaped who I am today. My family has always struggled with mental health, in unseen and seen ways. They often coped with addictions and I saw the ramifications of that pathway my entire life. I started looking for graduate studies that could hold the weight of my inner world, still offering that stability education has always offered me. I found CIIS, my current institution, where they ask us to center our minds, hearts, bodies, and souls. I have found tremendous healing from my education and feel grateful that these skills cultivated within me deep reserves of empathy, understanding, and patience. I offer counseling and continue to train in ways to hold diverse containers, offering healing through many modalities. I continue to study in hopes of producing original academic content that is both accessible and digestible. I come from humble beginnings, recognizing the blessings that my education has offered to be in this place at 25 years old. I continue moving forward, seeking a life out of survival mode and instead rooted in caring for myself and my community. There are inner parts of me-- the painter, the cook, the dancer-- that begin to come forward the more safety and love I cultivate. Thank you for getting to know me a little bit :)

I am completing a PhD in East-West Psychology while training as a counselor at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. I decided to pursue psychology, in part, because of my experiences with partner violence. It was after getting out of an abusive relationship that I was looking for studies that could hold the weight of my inner world. Psychology provided me various lenses to process my own experiences through, while also teaching me how to hold space in the same way for others. With all the skills and tools I am gathering, I plan to use my degree to assist individuals or groups with similar traumas and experiences. It is because of, not in spite of, these personal experiences that I am developing a deeper compassion for myself. My education has allowed me to access so many skillful ways of working with trauma and suffering. I do not take for granted that my studies have allowed me to heal parts of myself within the context of a graduate program. Education is such a vital component to my healing because harmful intimate relationships, especially violent and unpredictable ones, can leave the survivor feeling like they are the cause of such abuse. The time frame for working with trauma and abuse is non-linear and extremely complex. I have found that psychology offers many entry points to navigating challenging past experiences. My specific program is East-West Psychology because we examine worldviews from many cultures and regions. We expand beyond traditional, Western psychological models to capture a greater percentage of our diverse population. What has been helping and supporting my healing journey is unique to me and my experience, which is why this expansive educational model allows me to diversify my skills through many perspectives and worldviews. In the short time I have been in this program, I feel transformed by it. It allowed me to work with all the narratives I had around past partner's violence. Cultivating self-compassion and forgiveness were essential. I think going through my experience is what will support me the most with my counseling services because I have developed deep reserves of empathy, understanding, and patience. I intend to disseminate the information and tools that have been essential and crucial to my journey. I believe these tools should be widely accessible and digestible and will continue to find ways to develop that in the field. Finally, because of my speciality in East-West Psychology, I hope to connect to underserved and underrepresented communities with the context I carry of my program.

I truly believe the primary action one can take to create a positive impact is starting the work within themselves, which ultimately creates a rippling effect outward from each action moving forward. In my own mental health journey, I think back on the different ways I wish I received support or guidance. For me personally, I emphasize the importance of personally developed value systems. I was never taught to ponder my values and create a life that allows me to live within those values. However, since starting that work a few years ago, it has greatly changed my mental health journey for the better, which includes my relationship with all the people around me. One of the greatest actions in creating positive impacts is demonstrating the work ourselves and using our actions as models of behavior. My own values are compassion, humor, integrity, curiosity, tolerance, and spirituality. If I can show up in the world as a model of those behaviors regularly, I believe that outward impact is positive. Tolerance is a value of mine that relates to this work deeply. In personally developed value systems, you can assume each individual will select their own set of values they wish to live around, which means there is potential for conflicting beliefs and behaviors. Tolerance allows us not to always agree with everyone around us, but at least learn to tolerate and make space for difference. This is crucial because each individual is at a different point in their mental health journey and I do not believe the role of a therapist is to tell their patient how to live. I believe a mental health counselor is meant to support their patient through active listening and simply 'being with' the patient through their navigations. The counselor can empower the client to take the reins on their healing journey and start determining for themself what they want their life to look like. Counselors can support clients with conflicting points of view because of values such as tolerance. We are not all meant to be the same, but we can still support and love each other through our differences, which is a mindset and behavior that has such a positive rippling effect in my experience. While this is one of my primary points of view, I do not want to disregard systems of power that fail to support marginalized communities. Creating a positive impact includes supporting individuals with identities that are often overlooked, or even mistreated due to their differences. Tolerance and values based practices may provide a basic foundation for positive action, but there is a loud call for intentional focus on these systems of power that perpetually harm marginalized identities. Actions that have a positive impact include actions that create positive change in these communities. This might look like, instead of prioritizing mental health in a predominantly white neighborhood, diverting resources to support people of color in obtaining basic needs. Basic needs must be met before mental health work is even realistic. How can we encourage good sleep, nutrition, or exercise to people without a stable home or food source? It is within these communities that change is necessary and there needs to be more people motivated to prioritize that change in order for there to be a positive rippling effect. Value systems open us up to our hearts, empathy, and compassion, which I think motivates changes in behavior. With more empathy and compassion, we tolerate more, but we also wanted to help more. This might assist our society in prioritizing the communities who have been overlooked too long.

In mental health fields, you often hear how hurt people hurt people, however, I prefer the maxim that healed people heal people. That has been my motivation and support throughout my own healing journey. I grew up in a broken household with my parents divorcing before age 2 due to my father's struggled with alcohol and drug addiction. Both of my parents remarried, meaning I had two biological parents and two step-parents. To many, this would be great to have four role models to lean on and look up to; however, for me, all four of these figures were struggling with mental health concerns that increased their dependencies on addictions. My father and stepmother struggled with alcoholism and meth addictions, which landed my father in prison for the first 12 years of my life. My mother and stepfather struggled with alcoholism and a dependency on illegal pain killers, which ultimately depleted all our resources, leaving me houseless at age 14 through age 18. In high school, there was a moment in my mental health struggled I nearly turned to addiction, but a whisper in the back of my head told me if I just made it to college, I could break the familial pattern and things would get better. I made it to undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara at age 18, which was the first step in my healing journey. My mental health was struggling from a mixture of abandonment issues, post-traumatic stress disorder from child abuse and sexual abuse, and feeling alone in navigating all that turmoil with no support system. During this time, at age 19, I lost my father to addiction when he suffered a massive heart attack. It opened my eyes to not only the severity of addiction, but the severity of mental health concerns that increase our dependency on these substances. At age 21, I lost my oldest sister, who was only 31, to alcohol and drug addiction as well, stemming from her underlying mental health struggles. These people were not addicts because they wanted to be, in fact, I know they all wanted and needed help. They were hurting. Hurting so bad that they needed anything to dull some of that pain, even if just momentarily. While I was surrounded by this addiction from a young age, I did not want it to be my story too, or the story I passed on to my children if I decide to have them. I knew I needed to make different choices. I reached out for support for my mental health and was motivated to work through my trauma, and the trauma my parents passed down to me when they were too hurt to look at it. I made it through undergrad by consistently making choices that differed from my parents, yet it was their guidance that allowed me to see my own path more clearly. I love my parents and I know they did the best they could. Hurt people do not want to hurt people, but healed people want to heal people. I am in graduate school to earn degrees that will allow me to heal people struggling with mental health and addiction dependencies. I do not want to condemn these sufferings, but rather, demonstrate that each person is worthy of being healed, loved, and cared for. On my healing journey, I only see it fit to assist others find their way too. Finally, while navigating these healing modalities, it was obvious how they can be inaccessible to marginalized communities. It is my goal to provide accessible and equitable mental health services.