Malissa Veroni is the founding CEO and lead therapist at Keep’N It Real Solutions. For the past 15 years Malissa has been a foot soldier in the field of social work; teaching, and serving students and clients alike. She is a published author, mentor, and mental health therapist who focuses on combining theory, practical approach and individual quality holistic care to help clients heal and grow from a variety of concerns. Malissa is known as a specialist in the field of Narcissistic Abuse, Intimate Partner Violence, the LGBTQ2s Community, and in Sex Therapy. She is also a Designated Capacity Assessor and a mentor to several social workers worldwide.
Malissa Veroni, Founding CEO & Lead Therapist
Introduce yourself! Please tell us about you and your life, so we can get to know you better.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you. My name is Malissa Veroni, and I am the Founding CEO and lead therapist at Keep’N It Real Solutions. I am a social worker by training and have been in the field for over 15 years. I have completed my master’s in Social Work as well as several specialized trainings to best serve people who are brave enough to get help.
In my personal life, I am soon to be married and have beautiful bonus children and grandchildren I learn from daily. I call them bonuses – because I am not a “step” of anything. And more importantly, because they are beautiful additions to my life, and I hope they can say the same about me for their lives.
In my limited free time, I love to travel the world with my loving partner, we have been to 13 different countries so far. I also love to cook, attend cultural events, learn something new, and volunteer to help the greater community, and I live for music. I am the inaugural Ms. Italy World Universal and placed runner-up in internationals. I was also a final contestant for Ms. Canada World Universal 2022. I am seeing a theme here – I am a first-born Veroni female in over 72 years. What is your business name, and how do you help your clients?
My business is Keep’N It Real Solutions, a virtual mental wellness service that removes barriers for people ages three and up to access high-quality specialized mental health care in Canada. Our team is fantastic, and we specialize in several issues, including and not limited to: trauma, intimate partner violence, sex therapy, couples counselling, LGBTQ2s care, and surviving narcissistic abuse. We also provide capacity assessments for adults in Alberta and are looking to expand services based on popular demands. What are your current goals for your business?
I am doing it! I rebranded to align more with my approach while working on my fears with a fantastic coach. Stay tuned for more! What would you like to achieve for yourself and your business in the future?
That’s easy; I would love to continue to expand! We need excellent mental health services and accessible, high-quality, trained people to help us along our life’s journey. I would love to have more people working for me. I am also working on my first-ever book to help reach individuals who may not otherwise be able to join our sessions. Who inspires you to be the best that you can be?
I have been limited and blessed by the people in my life. The people that inspired me the most to be who I am today are my papa, my late honoree uncle (Don Irvine), my past partner, and of course my fantastic soon-to-be spouse. All of these people have played a part in helping to shape who I am today. The biggest inspirations come from the clients, interns, and students I am honored to serve. I learn so much from them, can see myself in their journeys (because I lived it too), and know I am in the blessed position to walk alongside them during their difficult times. Nothing feels better than seeing people reach their therapeutic goals and live their best lives while owning their awesomeness. What is your work inspired by?
Pain. The pain I felt and the pain the clients I serve feel. I like to think that my stubborn nature, even as a child, I knew things could and should be better – and that is how I live my life. No one deserves to live that way. If you could change one thing about your industry, what would it be and why?
This comes easy to me as I serve a lot of other therapists, doctors, and other helping professionals in my clinic. Social work is always dear to my heart and is in my blood, though it is a challenging and thankless job. I would develop a mentorship student debt removal program in Canada and hopefully transfer it to other countries. My colleagues in the field, especially in the United States, have substantial debt, years of training, and struggle to pay their bills. I am flabbergasted that there are Facebook groups for social workers who need 2-3 more jobs to pay bills. Social workers go where the police sometimes won’t go. Social workers deal with the most fragile and challenging situations and populations. If we do not care for ourselves and do not allow other people and organizations to treat us properly, we are serving from empty, which is a dangerous hill to climb. Because of this, we lose great social workers and sadly even see high rates of suicide, mental health, and additions in the field. Tragically we know of social workers who lost their lives on the job. This is where I hope a program like this would implement positive change. It would involve working with local and national governments to allow newly graduated social workers to work in remote or harder-to-serve populations ‒ like mental health and addictions (it would be a great base knowledge building for any practice of social work) and provide a good living wage. After completing two years of work, under the support of great mentors, new graduates will leave with more skills, more excellent knowledge of the field, a strong network, and no student debt to worry about! If someone knows how to make this happen, please give me a call. I would love to chat! Tell us about a pivotal moment in your life that brought you to where you are today.
Wow, you know how to ask the good ones, don’t you? There are many pivotal movements in my life, and I cannot choose just one. In looking at all of them, there is a theme. These fundamental movements happen when I have no choice but to push through or lay down, and when expected or non-expecting people lend their faith in me until I can regain my faith in myself. With that, I had surpassed my traumas, trials, and tribulations ‒ even when I did not think I could. And I am just starting!
