The Field of Mental Health Counseling has probably never been relevant than it is today given that recent findings by Mental Health America (MHA) indicate that in 2024 roughly 23% of adults experienced a mental illness in the past year, with 5% experiencing serious thoughts of suicide. Likewise, 13% of adolescents in 2024 reported experiencing suicidal thoughts, with one in five reporting having experienced at least one serious depressive episode during the year. Clearly, the statistics indicate that mental health in America continues to be a serious concern, with not nearly enough providers to meet the demand. Given the relevance of the mental health conversation today, gaining insight into the field of counseling from professionals who are in the trenches doing the work of trying to address these alarming numbers seems imperative. We are looking for some insight by exploring the thoughts of mental health professional and Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor (LCPC) Jennifer Martin Rieck. Jennifer is the owner of Epijennetics.com and Epijennetics Counseling & Consulting in Libertyville, Illinois.
Jennifer Martin Rieck, Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor
Tell us about Epijennetics.com, the website, and what inspired it.
Epijennetics.com is probably my biggest achievement and what I am most passionate about presently. The website itself was inspired by a growing awareness of the impact of mental health information and how impactful simply understanding mental health issues and relationship concepts can be on someone’s well-being and quality of life. I have found that the process of educating clients on concepts and disorders, and even just giving them a language for their experiences, can pretty quickly positively impact that person’s symptoms. By understanding their reality and being able to communicate it to others, individuals often feel an immense sense of relief and a new-found empowerment.
There is a concept in Psychology that says when individuals feel that they have a sense of control over their world, we call this an internal locus of control, versus feeling powerless, they tend to feel much better in terms of anxiety and depression. While the individuals in their life might not change or their diagnosis might not change, just understanding their behaviors, other’s behaviors, and understanding their role in their unhappiness, often starts them on a journey of change. They start defining what they can and cannot control. This mindset shift enables them to really dig in and focus on the part of the situations that they control, rather than wasting energy on trying to control others or control outcomes. This makes their mental processes much more efficient and has a really positive impact on their mental health. The more I began to understand the power that knowledge has on people, the more I began to think it unfair that not everyone has access to such knowledge.
Unless individuals live in an affluent community or have access to therapy, which many don’t, individuals are not likely to ever seek out these meaningful concepts because they aren’t even aware that they exist. This is really what prompted me to build the website. My hope in creating the website was that if I created meaningful content and then paid to promote it globally, individuals who might never otherwise learn these concepts might just happen upon it on social media. My ultimate hope with the website was just to empower individuals by giving them knowledge that should belong to everyone equally, not just the people who have the privilege and access to engage in therapy.
Tell us about Epijennetics Counseling & Consulting and what makes it unique in the field of counseling?
Epijennetics Counseling & Consulting is my private therapy practice located in Libertyville, Illinois, where I live. Here, I practice schema-focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). If you know much about mental health counseling, you are probably aware of CBT. CBT is pretty well accepted as the most evidenced-based treatment for mental health problems like depression and anxiety. The concept behind CBT is really that there is a cyclical relationship between our thoughts and beliefs, our feelings, and our behaviors. Oftentimes we have a thought which then results in a strong emotion and then we do something, a behavior, as a result of that emotion. CBT assists individuals in really understanding the thoughts that are driving their unwanted feelings and behaviors and helping them to address them in a way that improves how they feel and reduces unwanted behaviors or symptoms. I do hold the belief that changing someone’s mind is really the way to change how they feel and behave. There is power in changing our minds.
I practice CBT, with a focus on challenging 18 specific Early Maladaptive Schemas that were identified in Schema Therapy, which was developed by Jeffery Young & Colleagues over the past couple of decades. It was really developed to treat more difficult mental health cases and goes quite a bit deeper than traditional CBT. Schema Therapy really seeks to understand the hurtful messages and negative core beliefs that individuals with chronic mental health problems often hold. The concept of schema has to do with learning.
As we are going through our childhoods, we are continually taking in information and building blueprints which we will use for interpreting future information. Often, since we have always used these blueprints or seen things through these schema lenses, we often don’t realize they are even there. I see Schema Therapy as a way of helping to reveal to others the lenses they are wearing that are causing problems for them. Most of the time we go through life not realizing that we are chronically being impacted by schemas and that they are really driving the feelings and symptoms that we have, such as depression or anxiety. Without an awareness of our schemas, we can go through life unintentionally reinforcing schemas by acting on the emotions that are coming from them. I come alongside my clients and help them explore their schemas, how they drive their feelings and symptoms, and how to prevent acting on them and subsequently reinforcing them. I have found schema-focused CBT to be a really effective way to address mental health problems in individuals. As I mentioned, the awareness of schemas can go a long way towards helping people feel empowered to make changes and to feel they have the tools they need to work on themselves. This work and seeing people truly recover from mental illness is really a moving experience for me. I am so grateful to be able to do this work and to continually learn from my clients regarding what drives mental illness. This work also inspires a lot of the writing that I do on Epijennetics.com.
What sparked your passion for this work?
This work is certainly personally meaningful to me, as I had to go through a lot of growing and healing myself. I spent many years making sense of my own experiences and feelings. I grew up in an emotionally dysfunctional family, so it took quite a lot of reading and therapy myself to get to a place where I understand all of the ways that those experiences impacted me. I also had quite a few important people in my life throughout the year who had various personality disorders, including Borderline Personality Disorder, Anti-Social Personality Disorder, and Narcissistic Personality Disorder. When I was in my twenties I was desperate to understand these people and their behaviors and feelings. I studied everything I could to learn more and understand them. I also wanted to understand how therapy could help them heal and also how I could be different when engaging with them.
I started realizing pretty quickly in graduate school that traditional therapy like CBT just wasn’t going to cut it in terms of helping these more complicated cases. Towards the end of graduate school, I was sharing with the director of my department about my frustration with how all of the theories of counseling we were being taught in graduate school fell short of encompassing these more complicated cases. I felt I needed something that was expansive enough to address all of the things that I understood about personality disorders. I didn’t want to just treat symptoms in my work, I wanted to do work that went beyond that to really heal people. That is when the director told me to look into Schema Therapy. As soon as I started learning about the schemas in Schema therapy, I knew that it was the right fit for me and that it was the work I wanted to be doing. I have integrated other theories into my work as well, such as Internal Family Systems and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, but I spend most of my work with clients trying to understand the schemas that are impacting them.
What is next for you in your career?
I have been working towards writing a book. I have been trying to write a blog post or an article on every aspect of therapy that I think would be meaningful for individuals to know, regardless of whether they are able to engage in therapy. I’d like to compile all of the pieces I have written into a weekly non-religious devotional dedicated to growing in awareness about relationship health and mental health. I truly believe that if individuals put in the time to become fully aware of all of these concepts and started making changes to be healthier in their lives, the result would be life-changing. Individuals wouldn’t just become wiser and have less mental health symptoms, but would heal, would become better friends, better parents, better partners. I truly think that it would be transformative. That is what I’m looking to do next, and I’m getting really close.
Related article: Schema: Don’t Be a Puppet at the Mercy of Your Past
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Learning about and healing from your past doesn’t have to be traumatic. I believe that this is the powerful thing about schema therapy. Individuals can learn how their past impacts them at a pace that is comfortable. Doing the Young Schema Assessment during therapy can really help enlighten individuals in a way that increases their sense of control over their feelings and reactions.
If you are located in Wisconsin or Illinois and would like to work together, please feel free to reach out through the website. If you are located elsewhere, you can utilize sites such as Psychology Today or Grow Therapy to find a therapist licensed in your state. Be committed to growth, healing, and the hope of a happy and meaningful future.
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