Workplace Trauma Is the Thing Nobody Books Therapy For — Kinsey Morgan of Arise Counseling

I’m Jeremy Rivera, and on this episode of the Unscripted Small Business Podcast I sat down with Kinsey Morgan, LPC-MHSP, the owner of Arise Counseling Services in Brentwood, Tennessee. She’s been running the practice for eight or nine years, specializing in trauma therapy, mood disorders, and grief and loss.

I expected a conversation about therapy. What I got was a conversation about work — specifically, that the single biggest shift Kinsey has seen in her caseload since COVID is workplace trauma, and that almost nobody thinks of their job as a legitimate reason to call a therapist. That blind spot is the reason this episode belongs on a small business show.

The Path In: A High School Counselor Who Was Good at Teens

Kinsey’s route into psychology started with her own therapy in high school, for bullying and family stress. The therapist she worked with was, in her words, phenomenal — and unusually good with teenagers, a group notoriously hard to sit with. In college, professors who kept private practices alongside teaching talked about the work in the first person: what they were learning, what clients were bringing in, how they were helping. That’s what turned interest into a career.

“It’s very unique in the way that we are all part of psychology, walking around in bodies every day. And we are the subject matter. So we get to kind of study ourselves and other people at the same time.”
— Kinsey Morgan

EMDR, Explained Without the Jargon

EMDR stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, and Kinsey’s explanation of it is the clearest I’ve heard. Watch a sleeping child’s eyes move in REM sleep — that’s the brain categorizing the day and filing it into long-term memory. Traumatic memories don’t get filed. They get stuck in the fight-or-flight region, and the triggers that grow out of them can impede a person’s whole daily functioning.

EMDR recreates that bilateral stimulation while you’re awake and recalling the memory. Her analogy for what that does:

“Think of EMDR as sort of your button or your dimmer switch to dim down the brightness of that memory so that we can look at it, examine it, walk ourself through it emotionally and not have to live in it every day.”
— Kinsey Morgan

She contrasts it with traditional talk therapy, which she describes as a corkscrew — forward a bit, back a bit, forward a bit more — effective, but slower. EMDR she describes as a laser: it goes directly to the belief or the emotion attached to the memory. And it works the same way across wildly different sources, from childhood trauma to natural disasters to work-related trauma.

Intellectualizing Instead of Feeling

Alongside EMDR, Kinsey uses CBT, inner child and somatic work, and Emotionally Focused Therapy. Her reason for the EFT emphasis is a cultural diagnosis that lands hard on the kind of high-achiever who listens to business podcasts:

“In our culture, especially in the US, we really love to intellectualize our way around things instead of feeling our way through something. And sometimes that pattern can keep people in therapy for a lot longer than they actually need to be.”
— Kinsey Morgan

Talking your way around a problem keeps you in the loop with it. The work is going through the emotion, not narrating it.

“They Couldn’t Teach What They Didn’t Know”

The reparenting conversation surprised me too. I assumed it was for people with absent or abusive parents. Kinsey says it’s both-and — the same mechanism at different intensities. Most people arrive feeling the need to defend their parents, and the unlock is recognizing that parents are still people, and people can’t meet every need.

Her generational read: Gen X and millennials largely had baby boomer parents, whose own parents came out of an era when discussing family matters — especially anything touching mental health — could genuinely be dangerous. So an entire generation never learned to express or regulate emotion.

“They couldn’t teach what they didn’t know.”
— Kinsey Morgan

Which is why a substantial part of her practice is helping adults in that middle bracket learn to express, feel through, and let go of what’s holding them back.

The Body Keeps the Receipts

Asked what’s genuinely new in her field, Kinsey pointed to the growing understanding of somatic experience — emotions that don’t get processed showing up physically, including a documented link between difficulty expressing emotion and autoimmune conditions later in life.

“Our body is extremely smart in that way and it takes that and it goes, okay, well, if you’re not going to process this and get it out, then I am going to harbor it. It’s kind of the body keeps a score mentality.”
— Kinsey Morgan

Why She Doesn’t Take Insurance — and What She Does Instead

This is the part every small business owner should hear, because it’s an honest look at how a solo practice actually makes accessibility decisions. Kinsey doesn’t bill insurance, for two reasons.

The first is capacity: she’s a one-woman practice with no team to handle the paperwork for every client. The second is more interesting — billing insurance requires a diagnosis. Someone arriving with grief after a loss may not meet the criteria for a depressive disorder, because they’re dealing with grief, not depression. Assigning a label anyway puts something permanent in that person’s insurance history that can be financially detrimental later.

Her workaround is to be direct about cost on the very first phone call, and to treat referral as an obligation rather than a courtesy: if her fee doesn’t work for someone’s situation, she considers it her ethical duty to connect them with an agency, a sliding-scale option, or a therapist who does fit their budget. It’s a good model for any service business that can’t serve everyone — be transparent about price early, and make the handoff genuinely useful.

Workplace Trauma: The Category Nobody Names

Here’s the finding that reframed the whole conversation for me. Most of Kinsey’s clients come in because functioning is inhibited — they wait until it is. And what’s driving that lately isn’t what you’d assume:

“I’ve seen in the past couple of years a huge rise, and probably due to COVID and all of the ups and downs with occupational issues and shifts and things — honestly, a huge rise in workplace trauma.”
— Kinsey Morgan

What it sounds like from the client’s chair: I need to keep this job, I’m having trouble holding boundaries, I have no work-life balance, and it’s robbing me of life satisfaction.

Her structural point is the one worth sitting with. We spend the majority of our waking week at work, in high-stakes relationships with people we didn’t choose — and the worker isn’t the one who controls the environment. She compares it to a household: the company sets the emotional climate the way parents do, and everyone else lives in the byproduct.

COVID compounded it twice. It disrupted where and how people worked, and it simultaneously removed the coping strategies they used to metabolize the stress — going out with friends, a ballgame, a concert. Then people were sent back into offices they’d been out of for years.

Change One Part, the Whole System Shifts

Kinsey specializes in individual therapy, not couples or family work — but she’s clear that individual work doesn’t stay individual:

“If you change one part of the system, the whole system has to shift.”
— Kinsey Morgan

If a recurring fight always escalates, the question becomes what happens if your role in it changes — does the whole interaction soften? And when it doesn’t, that’s information too: sometimes the answer isn’t self-regulation, it’s that a boundary is genuinely being violated. Boundary work — personal, in-law, and workplace — is a constant in her practice.

Her Action Item: Introspection, Then the Phone Call

I asked for one thing a listener could actually do. Kinsey’s answer starts with an honest inventory: identify one area of your life you’d genuinely want to shift. Most people, if they’re honest, have at least one — expressing themselves more effectively, intimacy in a marriage, keeping up with kids who are changing faster than the parenting playbook.

Then the harder part:

“That phone call is the hardest phone call that most people have to make. But on the other end of it is usually a therapist that is really ready and willing to work with somebody.”
— Kinsey Morgan

She works from a strength-based approach, on the premise that clients already have inherent strengths — the job is finding them and putting them to use.

Connect with Kinsey Morgan

Kinsey Morgan, LPC-MHSP, is the owner of Arise Counseling Services in Brentwood, Tennessee, specializing in trauma therapy and EMDR, workplace trauma, mood disorders, and grief and loss. She also writes at the practice’s therapy blog.

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This episode is a conversation about mental health, not clinical advice. If you’re in crisis in the US, call or text 988 for the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.