Flip the Script: Interview with Barbara Ward, LISW, E-RYT

M: Hello, my name is Megan, and I’m here with Barbara, a therapist at the Cleveland Health and Wellness Center for our “Flip the Script: Ask a Therapist” series where you can get to know our CHAWC therapists a bit better. Barbara Kappus Ward is a social worker, yoga teacher, and clinical therapist at the Cleveland Health and Wellness Center in Rocky River, Ohio. Her professional and personal mission is to create balance in mind, body, and spirit through integrating Eastern Philosophy with Western medicine.  She has been in the counseling field for over 26 years. She graduated from Adelphi University on Long Island, NY with a Master of Social Work in 1991, and she received an Integral Yoga License in May 2004. Her extensive experience includes working with young children in a psychiatric setting, counseling the Geriatric population in hospital and nursing home settings, and, currently, treating women’s issues, depression and anxiety, physical illness and traumas, parenting issues, and life transitions. 

She is passionate about balancing the mind and body from anxiety, depression, dementia, PTSD, learning disabilities and physical illness that cause so much pain and chaos in her client's daily functioning. She finds that Psychosomatic therapies combined with traditional Cognitive Behavioral Therapy approaches have been beneficial for her clients.

Barbara, thank you for joining me.

B: Thank you, thank you Megan.

M: I’m going to ask you a few questions about your practice, and the first one is when did you realize that you wanted to become a therapist?

B: Well, initially, it was during my high school years. I had several experiences that sort of inspired me to pursue the path of mental health. One was the opportunity that I was able to be a mental health intern at a day camp for the Center of Family Services in Cleveland, Ohio, and that was an eye-opening experience to be a seventeen-year old-working with outpatient mental health clients and developing movement activity, which was using pantomime, at the time, to express these mental health clients’ feelings. And we were able to take these clients into different settings in the community, and it was a really eye-opening experience at such a young age. And also through my younger years, I had opportunity to befriend many different therapists and psychologists that sort of guided me in making decisions, and what I would really want to pursue, and so right off the bat, in undergrad, I knew I wanted to go into psychology, and study psychology, and I knew too that I wanted to minor in sociology to study the broader span of human and community dynamics. It was brought on early on, and then through college, through undergrad, I just pursued it, and it kept unfolding. 

M: Great, thank you. And what populations do you enjoy working with?

B: Let’s see, through 26 years of experience, I’ve had a very broad experience: I’ve counseled children in a psychiatric hospital, and then I did counsel the general public after I published a manual and wrote a manual with Stony Brook State Institution about Lyme disease, and so I had access to community reports, healthcare, and research. After I moved back into the Cleveland area, I focused a lot on the geriatric population, and was a part of working in hospital geriatric assessments and doing counseling in nursing homes for the residents and also to educate the staff. And I also went into teaching children and adults when I started my own business in yoga therapy for about fifteen years, and did a lot with movement therapy and the body and the physical reaction of the somatic feeling with the body, and then currently I love to counsel the adult population right now with anxiety, depression, trauma, life transitions, death and dying issues, losses, physical impairment, and mainly different imbalances in the body. 

M: Yeah, you’ve had a lot of different experiences.

B: Yeah—a variety. 

M: And what treatment modalities do you draw from in your work? 

B: I integrate my knowledge of Eastern and Western medicine in trying to create a balance with the mind, body, and spirit of the individual. I’ve found the modalities of somatic psychotherapy, Gestalt therapy, mindful-based cognitive therapy, a neuro-bio-psychotherapy, and then also a body-energy work through movement. Also positive psychology has been very prevalent in the mindful-based studies. And then I go back to psychotherapy because sometimes that helps individuals to reflect on their developmental stages. So I try to combine a lot of different modalities to fit the need of where my clients are.

M: Yes. What are your unique strengths as a therapist?

B: My strengths as a therapist, I would say at this point I have a life-long experience, but also I have an intuitive sense of empathy, and the ability to access and apply a variety of techniques to assist the clients to sort of discover whatever is their imbalance of the mind and body, and find what balance works with them through awareness and learning different coping skills. So I find that is pretty much some of my strengths.

M: Thank you. And how do you manage stress in your life?

B: I manage stress by supporting myself with the love from my family, and of course I have two little dogs that are very therapeutic. I’ve been practicing yoga for over 22 years, so besides teaching, I do my own practice. I love to renew and meditate in nature, and be outdoors. I nourish myself with a very healthy diet; a deep, deep spiritual practice; and really trying to create boundaries between my different roles in life. 

M: And my final question for you is what makes therapy effective, and who can benefit from therapy? 

B: Therapy is effective when there is a trusting bond between the client and the therapist, so that’s initially very important. The therapist as I view it can be almost like a guide or a mentor to the client, so the client can try to find their own guide or teacher within themselves. So it’s very important that the therapist is sort of like a medium, that teaching role. The client will develop their own strengths, hopefully build their own resilience to life’s stresses so they don’t depend on the therapist, that it’s integrated into the client. Therapy, I see, can be used by all in need. Because of a particular situation or problem, or just for a growth experience, to discover one’s own need for growth in order to learn more about the union of their mind, body, and spirit.

M: Well, thank you very much for sharing with us today, and for your time.

B: Thank you, I appreciate it and I hope that gives you a better understanding.