Her Story
About Eka
Eka ChildsMcTear is a licensed marriage and family therapist (LMFT) with 16 years of experience in mental health. She is registered with the California Board of Behavioral Sciences and is an EMDR-trained therapist as well as a trained clinical supervisor. Eka provides individual therapy using trauma-informed and culturally competent approaches, specializing in trauma, grief, anxiety, and depression. She works extensively with clients from child welfare and probation systems, including transitional-age youth and adolescents emancipating from foster care. In addition to her clinical work, Eka supervises associate therapists by managing their client documentation, ensuring quality standards, and offering crisis support. She also serves as a preceptor for graduate trainees at a non-profit, handling program management and school-related requirements. Eka offers pro bono and sliding-scale sessions and participates in the Minority Psychology Network to provide community mental health resources and givebacks. Her approach is shaped by personal experiences, emphasizing firm boundaries and self-accountability to best serve her clients.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Eka
01What do you attribute your success to?
Going back to like you know mentioning about my own personal experiences and learning a lot about myself through being a therapist about like kind of my own boundaries as far as with my clients you know populations that I serve. There are certain populations that I don't work with at this time as my life had changed and went through certain things that I knew that I just didn't have the capacity to show up for folks and that would be doing them a disservice to just try to be their therapist and knowing that I'm incapable of truly leaning into what they're experiencing. And so learning that about myself is like being holding myself accountable and holding those firm boundaries so that I can you know really pour into my clients the way that they're expecting their therapist to do so.
02What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
It would be definitely make sure that you are taking time for yourself because you're going to be giving a lot of yourself to the profession that you're going into and it's going to require a lot more of your energy emotional energy than you may have at this starting point just starting out maybe in school. It's very important that there's a balance for self-care.
03What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
The biggest challenge always is just helping clients with like insurance a lot can sometimes be challenging like the ins and outs and referrals and things that we have to do that may not always be like our focal points as a clinician but it's a part of the work. Something that they teach you a lot about in grad school about the business side of it. So there is a lot of business orientation that has to happen when you're in practice for yourself. I would say that's always the caveat is more than anything the documentation is the biggest part of our work truthfully and that part can be taxing.
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