Interview with Rachel Davidow, LICSW

My psychotherapist colleague Rachel Davidow, LICSW interviewed me recently:

As part of providing resources to folks interested in learning more about different practitioners and types of therapy, I’m excited to highlight the work and resources of colleagues in the field whom I’ve worked with or know personally.

Ellis Kim is a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker (LICSW) practicing in California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Florida. We met in 2020 while working as clinical case managers at a residential center for individuals with eating disorders in the Boston area. He currently works full-time in private practice, offering a range of therapy approaches such as Internal Family Systems (IFS), Somatic Experiencing (SE), and CBT for Insomnia (CBT-I). He also specializes in working with folks of color, children of immigrants, and STEM and healthcare professionals. You can learn more about his work on his website: https://www.elliskim.com/

Rachel: Hi Ellis, thank you for sharing your background and clinical experience with me today. Could you tell us a bit about your background and your journey to becoming a therapist?

Ellis: Rachel, thank you for taking time to interview me. I always appreciated our professional and personal connection since we worked at the eating disorder clinic together. I’ve had such a good time getting to know you even more as we’ve both worked in private practice. 

Psychotherapy is my second career. During my 20s, I primarily worked in the financial industry, briefly as an investment banker and then researching and eventually managing portfolios of stocks at a hedge fund. My first career was closely linked to my college education in economics, which I studied at MIT. I was extremely committed to and even interested in financial markets, stocks, and investing. I would even say I had a moderate degree of talent in something difficult to get good at. Yet, it was a major adult lesson learned for me that what is interesting is not necessarily meaningful, although something can be both. For me, finance was very interesting - and still is - but not meaningful enough for me. 

Simultaneous with my economics education, I also attended psychotherapy for the first time at my school’s student counseling service. I had a powerful “corrective emotional experience” with my therapist who was a post-doctoral fellow at the MIT clinic. This psychotherapy encounter, in addition to another formative therapy experience later in my 20s, inspired me to explore becoming a therapist. I had a strong intuition from early on that this was a path that was probably right for me. It took a few years of working through my fears and hesitations, but ultimately I acted on this intuition. Years later, I feel vindicated. Strangely, as I reflect, this is also how I invested. Despite my technical education, I am fairly holistic and qualitative in my decision making, and I listen carefully to my intuitions. My most successful investment decisions were made this way, and this is also how I made the big bet on my second career when in my early 30s, I went back to graduate school to become a therapist.

Rachel: I know you offer a variety of services and therapeutic approaches, including Internal Family Systems (IFS), Somatic Experiencing (SE), and CBT for Insomnia (CBT-I). Could you share more about the kinds of presenting issues your clients most often come to you with, and how you typically address them?

Ellis: I consider all the experiential therapies I practice - including IFS and SE - to have roots in mindfulness. Regardless of what the client wants to accomplish in therapy and in their lives, learning to be more fully aware of one’s internal experiences - emotions, thoughts, bodily sensations, transferences from past people, and so on - gives them vastly more access to their own agency and ability to live up to their own values. I frequently use mindfulness in session with clients, which can range from a sensory exploration of one’s internal state (similar to Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction), to a revisiting of a traumatic event through the lens of body experience, to dialoguing with a loud, intense, and often harsh inner critic - a “part” in IFS terms, and much more.

People come to work with me on a whole range of problems, including chronic or episodic anxiety or panic, depression, addictive patterns, troubles with dating or existing romantic relationships, building one’s social world, processing traumas, navigating professional paths, exploring the impact of race and racism on one’s life, and much more.

I believe that so much of therapy is helping people get out of their default states and repetitive unconscious patterns, both individually and in all forms of relationships. If I can successfully help a client “drop down” into experiential states, that person is already out of their default mental state. As a therapist, one of my roles is scaffolding this non-ordinary state by tapping into my own curiosity and open stance. In IFS, this is called being in Self Energy. Inside this non-ordinary state of consciousness, there are more possibilities, a great sense of openness, and a fuller access to one’s self. I believe transformative experiences happen in this space.

CBT for Insomnia (CBT-I) is a short-term evidence based and highly structured psychotherapy for insomnia. This type of work is a meaningful departure from my other therapy work, but I am excited by it because of how frequently I see people’s sleep improving. 

Sleep is a powerful lever for mental health that not enough therapists have the background to use in therapy. I am a great believer in systems thinking, and one idea here is that a change in one part of the system can change all other parts of the system. My intention is to help someone’s sleep directly and indirectly help them with their emotional regulation, physical health, ability to stay present in relational stress, better attend to their life responsibilities and relationships, and more. I believe I can help their lives get meaningfully better if I can help them even modestly with sleep.

Rachel: How has your practice evolved over time?

Ellis: I have been influenced by our ongoing clinical collaborations. You and I come from different ends of the psychotherapy spectrum, with your roots more in CBT and exposure work, and mine more in experiential and mindfulness based work. My experience has been that psychotherapy is complex and challenging work, and I need to utilize every tool and approach I can in service of the client. In the last few years, I have been incorporating elements of Exposure Response Prevention (ERP) for clients with various forms of anxiety, including social anxiety. It’s very satisfying to witness people doing what they previously thought was not possible, and how this flows through to improved self-esteem and a bigger overall life. I can recognize that in vivo exposures are a very direct form of experiential work. Whether it’s mindfulness based or in vivo, I believe that new experiences are a core part of the change process.

Rachel: One of the things I really appreciate about our friendship is your intellectual curiosity, openness, and love of learning. I can always count on you for thoughtful recommendations—books, trainings, and resources across many therapeutic modalities. I’m curious whether you see these values show up in your therapeutic work with clients, and what you enjoy most about being a therapist.

Ellis: As much as possible, I try not to build walls between the various systems of knowledge I have. For example, if I can draw from my background in science or economics or business to communicate better with clients, I surely will try. A lot of building a therapeutic relationship is forming a whole new language that only two people can speak. I have observed that the language people bring into therapy is heavily shaped by the language of their work and educational backgrounds. If someone is frequently thinking about risk or optimization or abstract modeling in their work, it usually finds some way of impacting how they think and experience the rest of their lives. Sometimes I draw on knowledge far afield from therapy to connect with a client and speak some of their language. This can help build a sense of mutual understanding and hopefully trust. And if our work gets there, I might help them do mindfulness based work, where they experience below the level of language, more in emotion and body states. This is typically where the most change occurs in people. In this multifaceted change process, I have to draw on many diffuse parts of myself, including the more technical and problem solving focused part, the part of me that is constantly trying to improve my communication with clients, the part of me drawn to mindfulness, and the more humanistic part of me. I enjoy utilizing as much as myself as possible to help people work through extremely complex challenges in therapy. 

Rachel: Is there anything else you’d like to share with readers about yourself or your practice?

Ellis: I have great conviction in how much people can change. I can’t stress enough how much transformation can occur in one person. I am excited to witness it. 

Rachel: Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions and for the work that you do. I value consultation deeply and am grateful that we’ve stayed in touch and maintained our friendship.