In this episode, Maureen shares her journey of integrating alternative healing modalities into therapeutic practice. She discusses her exploration of various methods such as energy work, acupuncture, and Reiki alongside traditional therapy, emphasizing the holistic nature of healing. Maureen reflects on the limitations of the conventional therapeutic profession and advocates for the incorporation of alternative approaches to address clients’ diverse needs. She also dives into topics like psychedelic therapy, Tarot integration, and the significance of embracing alternative paths to achieve wholeness beyond clinical intervention.
Meet Maureen Clancy 
Maureen Clancy has been a licensed therapist and trauma expert for the past 20 years, helping women go through enormous life changes who have experienced childhood trauma.
She’s the creator of the Gate Passages Framework, a structured, bottom-up approach to healing trauma and going through major life changes. She’s certified in EMDR and trained in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (certification in progress), Internal Family Systems, and AEDP. She combines therapy with Reiki, Tarot, and flower essences.
She’s a certified NASW clinical supervisor for social workers seeking advanced clinical certification and runs supervision groups for newer therapists looking to gain skills in treating trauma. She’s presented on trauma and self-care at Rutgers University Graduate School of Social Work and Limerick Institute of Technology School of Social Care (County Clare, Ireland). She’s a certified yoga teacher (200-hour), 20-year meditator, self-taught artist and potter.
She is based in the NY metro area. She loves to garden, play pickleball, and feed people. She can be found at Maureen-clancy.com.
Expanding Healing Horizons: Embracing Alternative Practices in Therapy
Maureen highlights the diverse approaches to healing beyond traditional therapy, sharing her journey of exploring modalities such as energy work, acupuncture, flower essences, and herbs alongside therapy. She found that combining these methods was most beneficial for her well-being. However, upon entering grad school for therapy, she encountered limitations within the profession’s scope of practice, feeling restricted by its confines. This experience ignited her interest in integrating alternative healing practices into her therapeutic work, driven by her belief in the holistic nature of healing.
Exploring Psychedelic Therapy: Navigating New Horizons in Mental Health
Maureen discusses the growing interest and research around the use of psychedelics in therapy, noting that clients increasingly inquire about it. She acknowledges her limited experience in this area but recognizes its potential in mental health treatment. She reflects on the limitations of the current mental health system and emphasizes the need for alternative approaches. Maureen cites her early adoption of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy as an example of effective innovation in her practice. She shares her approach of transparently introducing new techniques to clients, including potential risks and benefits.
Healing Trauma with Reiki: Calming the Nervous System and Easing Hypervigilance
Maureen describes her use of Reiki, an energy work modality, particularly with clients who have experienced trauma. She explains how trauma can lead to hypervigilance, a constant state of alertness to potential danger. Through Reiki, she aims to calm the nervous system and reduce this hypervigilance, even in distance sessions where she doesn’t have physical contact with the client. Maureen reports positive feedback from clients who feel more grounded and less anxious after Reiki sessions. While acknowledging the lack of scientific evidence, she emphasizes the effectiveness of Reiki based on her own experiences and client feedback.
Integrating Tarot in Therapy: Nurturing Intuition and Insightful Healing
Maureen discusses her journey with Tarot, noting its lack of formal schooling and her approach to learning from respected teachers and attending conferences. She emphasizes the importance of intuition in Tarot reading and how it complements other empathic abilities in her therapeutic work. Maureen offers Tarot readings to clients as an optional tool for gaining insight and understanding. While some clients decline, others find it meaningful, and the report added layers of understanding and healing from experience.
Beyond Therapy: Exploring Alternative Paths to Wholeness
Maureen emphasizes embracing alternative healing modalities alongside therapy to achieve wholeness. She shares a poignant example of a client who found healing through skiing after losing her brother in a traffic accident. This experience highlights the multifaceted nature of healing and the realization that therapy alone may not suffice. Maureen acknowledges the diversity of healing methods and the profound impact they can have beyond clinical intervention.
Gordon Brewer: Well, hello everyone and welcome again to the podcast and I'm happy for you to get to know today Maureen Clancy.
Welcome Maureen. I'm so excited to be here with you, Gordon. Yes, yes. And as I start with everyone, why don't you tell folks a little bit more about yourself and how you've landed where you've landed? Yeah.
Maureen Clancy: Like most of your listeners, I've had a lot of twists and turns myself. I started out as a journalist and quickly realized that that wasn't for me.
I'd loved listening to people's stories. And I didn't really want to report on them and have such a distanced relationship with the people who are going through things. And so I got injured actually as a reporter with a repetitive strain injury, like a carpal tunnel syndrome.
Gordon Brewer: So
Maureen Clancy: I had to stop that and figure something else out.
And I went to therapy for the first time during that period. And I loved it so much I got really interested in it and it dawned on me that wow, this is what I loved about reporting, without having to have that distance with people I could really be in there with them. So I'm thrilled that that's what I do now.
And these days I have a private practice that I've had since 2008. I have a small group practice and we work with women, queer, non binary, lesbian individuals who have experienced childhood trauma. We're also currently going through enormous life changes, which always brings up either another layer of what happened.
Or if it was never even examined, it just brings all of that chaos into the present as you try to go through that change. So I really love working in that specific place with clients.
Gordon Brewer: Yeah, that's great. That's great. It's a much needed Much needed niche. And yeah, that's great. So, well, I know one of the things that we were chatting about before we started recording and it's something that you're passionate about is using kind of using alternative healing methods within therapy.
And so for folks that might, might, might not be familiar with that, or maybe need a little refresher on that, tell, tell us kind of what that's about and how you're using that in your practice.
Maureen Clancy: Yeah. I think there's so many different ways of healing and therapy is just one of those ways. And what I noticed for me as I was transitioning from being a reporter to working as a therapist is that I myself was trying different things in addition to therapy.
I was getting energy work in the form of Reiki. I was having acupuncture. I was using flower essences. I started using herbs and I noticed that it wasn't one thing in particular that was helpful. It was a combination of all of those things. And once I got to grad school, I noticed that pretty quickly, there were some guardrails that were put in place right away.
Like this is your scope of practice. This is it. This is what you are showing up for with your clients. And I always felt like that is so confining. Because for me, what was most helpful was more folded in rather than just therapy. So that's what first got me interested in bringing alternative healing into work is just my own personal experience with it.
Gordon Brewer: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, and I think one of the things that at least podcast, I'm hearing more and more people really kind of voice. the need for doing things just beyond kind of the traditional clinical practice in that, you know, for example, people incorporating yoga with therapy and you know, the other other thing that comes to mind that might fall into the category of alternative healing our use of psychedelics and, and that sort of thing.
And yeah, the other thing too, that's I, and maybe, maybe I'm mislabeling it, but even EMDR is kind of a non conventional way of, of doing doing healing. And so yeah. So you want to say more about that?
Maureen Clancy: Sure. I, I really find it fascinating that the use of psychedelics in particular is becoming so much more common and researched and it's being sought after.
Like I have people on consultations with me wanting to know about that, and I have some experience with that but certainly not enough to feel like I can bring that in. But I think we're at a time when the mental health system is really at a crossroads. It's not serving us in a way that really helps.
It can help for some people, but not for others. And there's all kinds of reasons for that, you know, access and things of that nature. But we're at a time when we need to really think about what else can be helpful here. What else can we use? And EMDR is a great example of that. I got trained in that in 2006, pretty early on.
And I remember going, this is kind of crazy. But as I do these practices with my fellow students, it's really working in me. I can see that it's effective.
Gordon Brewer: And so
Maureen Clancy: when I brought it into clinical work, I would say to clients, Hey, I just learned this thing. And this is what it's supposed to do. , this is what could possibly go wrong or what might not feel good, and this is what I'm gonna do in case that happens.
Gordon Brewer: Mm-Hmm. ,
Maureen Clancy: would you like to try it?
Gordon Brewer: Mm-Hmm. .
Maureen Clancy: And so clients quickly tried it. All of them were like, this is amazing. I love it. How did you do that? It feels like magic.
Gordon Brewer: And
Maureen Clancy: so now that there's so many more people practicing EMDR, it's more commonplace. But way back in the beginning, and I certainly wasn't in the way of beginning.
It was really an alternative method for healing. And so that trajectory, I think is going to be what we see more and more of alternative practices.
Gordon Brewer: And
Maureen Clancy: healing that can be brought into clinical work.
Gordon Brewer: Yeah, well, I think us seeing the science that kind of backs up the whole somatic effect when, particularly with trauma and, you know, the, you know, the activation of the amygdala and all of those kinds of things, finding ways that can calm that and, you know, you know, I think there's any number of ways that that can happen, I think, and there's no one size that fits all.
Maureen Clancy: Eat. And that's why I'm so excited to be a therapist right now, because we're really getting to understand that so much, especially with the limits of talk therapy for trauma, because with talk therapy, you know, the idea is that you gain insight. And with the insight, you can believe something differently about yourself, but you still have body memories that really insight can't help with.
And so that's where all the somatic work in trauma right now is really helpful for clients because it does get at that survival response in those body memories and help to reconsolidate them. So it's not showing up like that anymore.
Gordon Brewer: Yeah. So give us some examples of how you're using alternative healing methods and medicine in, in your practice.
And besides EMDR, obviously that's one that's pretty well known, but what are some other ways that you're incorporating that and how you incorporate it? So one of the things
Maureen Clancy: that I've been using most is Reiki and that is an energy work That works subtly on the energy body. And I noticed with anyone who's experienced trauma there's something about experiencing trauma that can cause a sense of hypervigilance.
You're constantly on the lookout for danger and assessing danger in your environment so you can keep yourself safe. And Reiki in particular can really work well with that by calming down that nervous system response of constantly having to watch. And be on guard for what's happening. And so what I'm doing with Reiki with a client and I do distance Reiki, it's not hands on Reiki.
I can really feel that hyper vigilance in their energy field. And try to transmit that Reiki into, you know, where I'm experiencing it so that it dials down. And so that's been really effective with clients based on the report that I'm getting from them. So after a distance Reiki session, they'll say, I just feel like myself.
Without all of that wondering and worrying about what's going to happen next, or they'll say, cause I feel just more grounded. I feel more in my body and solid.
And there's not a lot of science to back that up. It's really based on what I've experienced myself, what others have experienced with Reiki and what I'm hearing from my own clients.
So that's one thing that I'm incorporating with clients. That's been really helpful.
Gordon Brewer: Good. Good. Yeah. So how do you, are, are you finding that people are coming to you specifically for that or are they, are you needing to introduce it during the session sessions?
Maureen Clancy: It's so interesting that you asked that because there's a lot of beer involved in bringing in alternative healing for me.
And I think for other therapists too, who I supervise, and it's the idea of. This isn't evidence based, and am I going to lose my license,
Gordon Brewer: right,
Maureen Clancy: or how do I bring this into work with clients and have them understand the benefits and risks. And so, really. You know, first, what let me back up a little bit.
That fear was really present in me for a long time. And I was so worried about that. And I've done a lot of work with that fear. Like, where's it from? Who benefits from that fear? Is it something that is real? So, you know, present do, is it a real thing for work with clients? What can I do to dial down that fear?
And so little by little, I started saying, Hey, I offer this other healing modality. Much like I used to say, when I first learned EMDR, here's what it is. This is what I think it's going to help with. These are the potential risks. Would you like to try it?
Gordon Brewer: Yeah.
Maureen Clancy: And so you just heard me go through that verbal informed consent piece,
Gordon Brewer: right?
Maureen Clancy: And it's true of any intervention that you want to use in therapy. You have to know why you're going to use it, informing your clients what the risks and benefits are, and then seeing if they're open to it, if they are to it, and if they're not, don't.
Gordon Brewer: Yeah.
Maureen Clancy: So that's, How I started incorporating it with clients and then I started getting calls for therapy where the more I was like out of the closet with it, the more I would hear, I really want to do that work with therapy.
And I'm excited that you're offering that. I don't know anyone else who's doing that. So I started getting specific requests for that service, not just therapy, but also Reiki with that. And I would hear often from clients that they would say, well, I saw a therapist and then I also saw a Reiki practitioner
Gordon Brewer: and
Maureen Clancy: bringing it under one roof.
just made it more convenient and easy for them.
Gordon Brewer: So
Maureen Clancy: that's how I started doing it and how it exists today.
Gordon Brewer: Yes. What was the training process for learning the methods like for you?
Maureen Clancy: So I do other alternative healing, but for Reiki, since we're talking about that, there are three trainings that you go through.
There can also be a fourth depending on what school of Reiki is teaching it. So there's a level one where you do hands on Reiki and you learn the basics. Level two, you learn distance Reiki level three, you learn even more of the basics and practice and then level four, you can teach it to other people, which is really just attuning them to the ability to channel that energy and then teaching them how to transmit it to others.
Gordon Brewer: Yes, yes. So, yeah, so you mentioned that you have some other methods or alternative things that you do. You want to say some things about those?
Maureen Clancy: So Tarot, there's no particular school, you can do self study what was most helpful for me because I got so interested in it from my high school French teacher.
I would seek out teachers whose work I really respected, and for a while there was a Tarot Reader Studio it was a conference that would happen once a year. It hasn't happened in a couple of years now, and I'm not sure if it's going to continue, but I would learn from others. But it's really about tapping into your own intuition and whatever impressions you get as you turn over those cards.
And like most people who are on the front lines of helping people here, there's other abilities that we bring into that work. You could call them empathic abilities. But Tara is another way of channeling that information. So how I use it with clients is I'll say, Oh, you've got a question about, should you do this?
Or should you do that? Should we consult the cards? Do you want to see what the tarot says? And some of them are like, no, I don't really, I'm not comfortable doing that. And that's fine. You know, this is about the informed consent piece. And the other clients are like, yeah, let's try it. And what happens is really meaningful for them.
If they do want to try it, they report that it's It's non clinical information that brings another layer of understanding and healing into the work.
Gordon Brewer: Yeah, it's a, I would guess that part of Part of why that probably works. And this is just speculation on my part is that it brings an element of meaning to what they experience.
And that there's a kind of a, I'm going to dare say a mystical kind of spiritual component to it. People, it seems to speak to people.
Maureen Clancy: I really appreciate that you brought in that meaning piece, because one of the best things about therapy is that it helps you make meaning of your experience and what's happening.
But it's not just therapy that'll help with that. That might be the most common way to do it, but there are other ways to in ways that have been in use for thousands of years and other places on the planet.
Gordon Brewer: Right, right. Yeah, I'm always reminded of when I think of meaning, I'm always reminded of Victor Frankl.
His book, Man's Search for Meaning, and and I paraphrase this quote, I'm not sure exactly if it came from the book or just a quote of his, but he said essentially that if we don't have meaning in our life, we will quickly substitute finding meaning with it. Finding pleasure and pleasure is usually short term and not very, not very doesn't have much substance to it.
Whereas if we find meaning in our life and purpose in our life, that is really what gives us more of the oomph or the, or the, the, the path for really more wholeness. So yeah.
Maureen Clancy: Yeah. I love that. Cause that's so present in trauma work. Mm hmm. Because there's often this sense of why did this happen to me? And really, you know, definition of trauma.
can be, it overwhelms your ability to cope and understand. And so, yeah, bringing you know, bringing yourself to therapy and trying to find meaning is really helpful in healing trauma, as is finding meaning with all of these alternative Healing modalities that we now can use.
Gordon Brewer: Right, right. Well, I think it helps people rewrite the, rewrite the narrative they have about themselves.
And and that's where change occurs, because they can't necessarily change what has happened to them, but they can certainly change What that means to them. And so that I think is where he occurs as well. I
Maureen Clancy: agree.
Yeah.
Maureen Clancy: And really about that belief of who they are because that happened. Yeah. And I love seeing that change.
Gordon Brewer: Yeah. Yeah, realizing that they're not damaged goods, so to speak, but they're whole, whole people that are worthy of all the good things in life. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Maureen Clancy: And so that wholeness is really, you know, why I bring the alternative healing in because it's not just therapy that is going to be helpful. It'll be all kinds of other things.
I once had a client who lost her brother and she said, it's okay to share this, but we did therapy for a while. She started seeing me for something else. And her brother was killed in a traffic accident. And she found one of the most healing things was to ski up and down a mountain over and over and over again.
Cause she used to do that with him, but she found the action of. skiing to be so healing and it added such a depth to her healing that wasn't happening in therapy. And it really was another one of those instances where I was like, Wow, there's so many ways to heal. There's so many things that you can do.
It's not just clinical work.
Gordon Brewer: Right, right. Well, I love this stuff. And Maureen, I've got to be respectful of your time. And and I've really enjoyed this conversation. Tell folks how they can get in touch with you if they want to find out more about what you're doing and your work.
Maureen Clancy: I love supporting therapists who want to get better at clinical work, but are also interested in how to incorporate that healing that they find helpful in themselves and that they're curious about. I can be found on my website, maureen clancy. com. You can often find me on TikTok. I love making quick videos about healing from trauma and alternative healing tools.
And I'm also on Instagram and LinkedIn. I feel like I'm on all the things. That's where you can find me. And I love connecting with people out there on that.
Gordon Brewer: So, well, Maureen, you have any parting thoughts as we kind of end this?
Maureen Clancy: Yeah, if you're interested in bringing something into your clinical work, think about why what's that intervention going to do, and then do the informed consent piece and try it. See what you notice.
Gordon Brewer: Yeah. I think there are a lot of different paths to helping people heal and I don't, like we said earlier, no one size fits all. Thank you for being on the podcast and hopefully we'll have another conversation before too long.
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