Voices in Health and Wellness

Queer-Affirming Mental Health: Building Brave Spaces with Abbey Carter Logan

Dr Andrew Greenland Season 1 Episode 33

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What happens when mental healthcare providers themselves become targets of political attacks? How do therapists support marginalized communities while managing their own wellbeing? These questions lie at the heart of our conversation with Abby Cota-Logan, a pioneering force in LGBTQ+ affirming mental healthcare.

Abbey takes us inside Clintonville Counseling and Wellness, a practice she co-founded in Columbus, Ohio that's become a lifeline for transgender and queer clients. From offering free gender-affirming letters to accepting Medicaid despite financial challenges, their commitment to accessibility shines through every aspect of their work.

The conversation reveals the profound impact of sociopolitical factors on mental health. "For the LGBTQ+ community, the personal is political," Abbey explains, describing how legislative attacks create a state of constant hypervigilance among clients worried about losing healthcare, marriage rights, and even custody of their children.

Perhaps most compelling is Abbey's perspective on sustainability in helping professions. The pandemic transformed their approach, reducing daily client loads and emphasizing therapist self-care. Through community-building activities like canoe trips and regular supervision, they're modeling what authentic, joyful mental healthcare can look like.

We explore the business challenges facing small practices—from insurance nightmares to venture capitalist buyouts—and how Clintonville has adapted by diversifying services while maintaining their core mission. Their growth from five clinicians to over twenty without any marketing speaks to the desperate need for their services.

Whether you're a mental health professional, someone seeking affirming care, or simply interested in how healthcare adapts to societal challenges, this conversation offers valuable insights on creating brave spaces where healing can flourish despite external pressures.

Guest Biography and Contact Details

Abbey Carter Logan, MA, LPCC-S is a Supervising Professional Clinical Counselor and the Co-Executive Director of Clintonville Counseling and Wellness in Columbus, Ohio. As a queer-affirming clinician and community leader, Abbey is deeply committed to creating inclusive, trauma-informed spaces for LGBTQ+ individuals. She co-leads a thriving group practice focused on accessible, gender-affirming care and also plays a key role in training the next generation of mental health professionals through internships, supervision, and continuing education. Her work blends clinical excellence with advocacy, joy, and community healing. 


Title: Co-Executive Director & Co-Owner, Clintonville Counseling and Wellness
Location: Columbus, Ohio
Website: https://clintonvillecounselor.com
Email: abbey@clintonvillecounselor.com
Phone: +1 614-948-7300
 

Dr Andrew Greenland:

Welcome to Voices in Health and Wellness, where we connect with trailblazers across the US who are shaping the future of care, mental health and integrative well-being. I'm your host, dr Andrew Green, and today's guest is someone who truly embodies a commitment to both clinical excellence and community-centered leadership. Joining us is Abbey Cota-Logan, a supervising professional clinical counselor and co-executive director and co-owner of Clintonville Counselling and Wellness, based in Columbus, ohio. Abby brings a depth of experience in both direct clinical care and organisational leadership, and she also plays a key role in training and mentoring future mental health professionals. So, abby, welcome and thank you very much for coming on this afternoon.

Abbey Carter Logan:

Oh, thank you for having me. It's really nice to on this afternoon. Oh, thank you for having me. It's really nice to and weird to hear all that. So thank you for the introduction.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

You're welcome and are you in Ohio at the moment? Are you calling from Ohio?

Abbey Carter Logan:

Yes, I am. I'm in Columbus, ohio and, matter of fact, in our community called Clintonville, which is why we're Clintonville Counseling and Wellness, and I'm in the office while people are seeing clients.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

Okay, well, maybe we could start there. Could you talk a little bit about your role at Clintonville and your vision for establishing the practice? That'll be really interesting for us to hear.

Abbey Carter Logan:

Yeah, absolutely, and I think, before I can talk about any of that, I really want to acknowledge my positionality and the power that comes with that by even sharing my pronouns. Are she her? I am a queer woman, yet I am also a white cisgender woman married to a man, so I carry an immense amount of power and privilege everywhere I go, when I walk into a room, and I think it's really important for me to acknowledge that I view the world through that lens, but also I am working with folks who have a totally different lens that I learn from every day. So that is part of the basis of who I am and also who community and cover a whole wide range of sexual identity and gender identities. The communities just get treated differently in health and wellness care. That doesn't understand how to do affirming care. We see a lot of LGBTQ friendly or, you know, we accept all LGBTQ folks, but we're not, we don't always hear LGBTQ affirming, which is really important to us and gender affirming practices so that people know that they belong here. So you know, part of our vision is providing that space for the community to come in and see themselves reflected in the artwork, even in the furniture and the plants and I know that sounds a little weird, but it matters. Clients walk in here and they say I feel safe, I feel seen, which is so important in the mental health field anyway, but particularly with this population Part of our vision.

Abbey Carter Logan:

From starting and interrupt me anytime because I could talk for hours about this she was seeing trans clients and working with the transgender community and realized there weren't enough affirming therapists in Columbus and really not enough people who understood how to provide gender affirming care.

Abbey Carter Logan:

So she started the practice in December of 2016, and I promptly joined post-parental leave in February of 2017.

Abbey Carter Logan:

And we have really created this beautiful training program and we have an internship and we offer gender-affirming letters to the community for free and those letters are what the health care standards require for folks to get medical procedures. The health care standards require for folks to get medical procedures. Although many trans and queer folks are interested in medical procedures, that is a big part for some. Our whole goal in that is to reduce gatekeeping and keeping people from receiving the care they need to live their best life. So we really our vision when we started was to be a leader in the queer community for mental health, and I feel very proud of that. I feel like we've grown from five people who started a practice and thought we were just going to have fun and add, you know, have a service, and that was greatly needed to now we have more than 20 full time therapists and directors. We have a program and culture director and a clinical director and administrative director so that we can build more structure for more queer and trans therapists to see queer and trans folks.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

No, no, thank you. Thank you. Very interesting to see queer and trans folks. No, no, thank you, thank you. Very interesting, I was going to ask. So 2016 is when you started. How has your vision changed since those early days? Obviously, you've grown a lot, but is there anything about your vision for how this has all panned out? Has that changed at all?

Abbey Carter Logan:

Oh yeah, yeah, it's changed a lot. I think when we started we really wanted well, I don't know if fully cooked is the right word, but we wanted experienced therapists who'd been in the field for a long time and really at that time those were the only people going into private practice. That you know. You had a lot of experience in community mental health or in bigger agencies, and then you graduate to private practice and since I would say since COVID more and more folks are graduating from graduate programs and going straight into private practice. So we went from five you know more seasoned clinicians to now we have a lot of younger clinicians and seasoned clinicians because we're really working together for that mutual transformation and understanding what's happening in the community, because there's a lot and also that clinical piece and teaching each other.

Abbey Carter Logan:

So then we created a continuing education program. Then we created a continuing education program. So we have we provide continuing education to both providers and then also the community at large, so that there's more understanding of gender affirming care and transgender people in general. You know they're, and I've heard, anywhere from one to 4% of the population in the United States and probably globally. So people don't know how to work with them and, honestly, in this country and probably abroad too, people don't know how to recognize that they're just human beings, that we, we just treat human beings who happen to be transgender and queer and part of the LGBTQ community. So I think that we're just training more clinicians and then part of the Continuing Ed program is to do that across the state of Ohio and nationally, so that we're not just it's not just our clinicians who are learning, but we're spreading the word to the community. We also added an internship program, we've added a queer-centered ADHD testing, because it looks different in queer people and the traditional testings don't always work in the same way and we're about to add an autism testing program and, of course, our gender affirming letters program, which is free. So we just said we've grown these more programs to support the community and also to support our staff, because therapists in general, I think, get really burnt out if they're just seeing client after client after client after client and especially for our clinicians who are also queer or trans or both, they're hearing their story reflected back at them 24 hours a week, back at them 24 hours a week.

Abbey Carter Logan:

So you know, you had, when we were communicating, you had talked about burnout and I think that not only are clinicians feeling that burnout but also our clients are feeling that burnout because for the LGBT community the personal is political. The political is personal, especially in the United States right now, where there is constant rapid succession of executive orders attacking the community, new laws attacking the community, the Supreme Court, taking away rights and you know that's easy for cisgender, heterosexual people to do because they don't realize how the impact, the incredible impact this has on our lives, healthcare and literally taking away healthcare, wond, wondering if your marriage, equality rights are going to get stripped away, so many more things like do I have to leave the country? Are my kids going to get taken away? And all of that is coming down from the federal level and being reflected at the state level here in Ohio and the amount of stress that that causes.

Abbey Carter Logan:

I mean, let alone treating the mental health concerns. The mental health concerns are all exacerbated by those sociopolitical factors that really it's really hurting our community and so it's felt really by the clinicians and the clients alike. But I also I think it highlights both this shared struggle and the shared strength that the community has, because as we come together we can practice rest and self-care and joy and really experiencing that as a community, because this stuff doesn't get to take our whole lives. We can't live engulfed in tragedy all the time. It's just coming at us. So we have to find our joy and celebrate that together as a community, so that we're just not I mean comatose.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

So it sounds like you're creating movement, but let's go back to the nitty gritty of the day to day. What does a typical day look like for you at the moment, between seeing clients, leading the organization, managing your training programs?

Abbey Carter Logan:

Okay, it's changed a little bit because our director roles are new in 2025, which is a direct impact of feedback that we receive from our clinicians and our clients of needing additional support, where I supervise more of the clinical programs and my partner supervises more of the outreach programs, the culture programs internally and the training program. So I'm working a lot with our clinical director daily right now to solve problems, consult with clinicians, make sure that everybody knows what their role is and the clear lanes so that they can feel supported by that. So I write a lot of policy and procedure and I talked to a lot of people in the community and I attend a monthly meeting called the LGBTQ Roundtable of Central Ohio, where it's just professionals from media. We have a great publication called the Buckeye Flame. Here in all of Ohio we have leaders who've been leading the community for decades, different organizations like Equality Ohio I apologize because I can't name them all and I really want to, but it's just a really great community, so I'm part of that.

Abbey Carter Logan:

I meet with other group practice owners because it's really important to me, now more than ever, to protect the sustainability of our business and make sure that we are here to not only for our clients but for our clinicians, and so I do a lot of that and I also see clients. So I see very few clients. I have about six appointments a week on my schedule. Some get filled, some don't. I supervise clinicians. I'm also, you know, trying to stay up to date on all of the current events and protocols and ways to approach therapy so that I don't fall behind. Especially as a leader of a place, you need to be on top of that. And then there's the administrative, like financial decisions. So we have an amazing administrative director who does all of our bookkeeping, insurance, credentialing and so many more things like manages our benefits for our clinicians, and we meet with Emily and I, my partner, meet with him weekly to really manage what's going on financially, our payroll, what's happening with insurance companies, because that is a whole nother topic in the United States right now.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

So I don't cry um every person I've spoken to in north america that is one of the major bottlenecks and irritations, so it's interesting that yet again, you're affirming this.

Abbey Carter Logan:

I'm hearing from everybody it's just infuriating um reimbursements changing sometimes. Sometimes they're saying actually we're going to pay you less as our economy is getting more and more expensive. They are denying claims, which they've always done. Sometimes they'll take back money after they paid you and said oh, actually we changed our rates in January, so we're going to take back thousands of dollars that we already paid you. Or this person had secondary insurance, so we're going to take all of the money back and have Medicaid pay for it.

Abbey Carter Logan:

But Medicaid is getting stripped right now in our country. So it's just a lot. It's a lot to manage all of that, especially when you serve a marginalized population, because here in Ohio, a lot of the people that we serve have to be on Medicaid. It might be their only option, and we're not willing to stop taking it because we want to provide accessibility for our people. So we're keeping an eye on that. So that's a big part of my job. And then, of course, like adding benefits for clinicians and making sure that it's sustainable for them and trying to think about how we can offer more benefits but not offer them too early, before they're all figured out. So you talked about administrative overload in your email, so there it is.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

Outside of your clinic? What are you seeing in the mental health space more generally? Whether that's sort of clinical issues, operational issues or more systemic issues in society in general.

Abbey Carter Logan:

Yeah. So there's a couple of things that are really big that are happening out there. One of the biggest things, in addition to insurance barriers, is venture capitalists and even insurance companies are buying small private practices. So this small private practice model that we're operating under and a lot of other places they're getting bought out for a large amount of money. But then it really impacts the integrity of that counseling because there's different approaches and they're also snatching up therapists who say well, actually they're going to pay me three times more, so I have to go. So it makes it a little scary for small private practice. People are really having to diversify their services in order to survive, because insurance companies are not. I mean, they're our bread and butter, but we're not going to survive on those payments. One I really want to highlight oh, it really this breaks my heart People using AI as a counselor.

Abbey Carter Logan:

The AI is not trained in safety and legal and ethical practice. It's not a counselor. It has no idea how to do that. And sadly here the story just came out that a minor actually ended his own life because chat GPT told him to and they said they have safeguards because if someone says I want to commit suicide, then they'll say here's the hotline. But this kid had a month's long relationship with AI and so it got convoluted. The AI helped him write a suicide note to his family and helped him negotiate ways to do it. It's just really, really it's maddening and so sad and so scary, so we're trying to look out for that. I actually have a colleague in Barcelona who's creating her own chat GPT to train it with our legal and ethical standards because we got to get on the train.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

I don't want to be the person who creates that, but I'm obviously giving an example of a very, very tragic case, but can you see any value in something that gives a bit of accessibility to people that might not be able to access professional help, if they can at least have a starting point with something like an AI tool obviously not the one that you've just described, because there weren't safeguards in place, but something which was properly programmed, tested, tried, safeguarded? What do you think?

Abbey Carter Logan:

Yeah, I mean, I think that's exactly what my colleague out in Barcelona is trying to do is to help people, provide them hope and some clearer, more professional advice that they can actually go to and say, ah, I'm feeling anxiety, what are my options? And then I think that you could go in and say I'm in Columbus, ohio, I am closeted, gay and scared, who can I see? And then it would bring them hopefully to us or another practitioner, who's queer, affirming so things like that. But I think people don't know how to ask the right questions.

Abbey Carter Logan:

My experience at least with AI is you have to write really pointed questions like is this message clear, concise and compassionate? That's a prompt I use a lot to put my own message in and just ask is this working? And I don't think that people are asking kind of clear questions. They're really going to AI as, like, a relationship. So if the relationship could be more professional as opposed to just shooting out random things pulled from the internet maybe that's not a very well thought out question I think I'd have to sit with that some more to really answer it Okay.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

And what changes are you seeing in the client needs or expectations of those coming to your clinic since the pandemic, and how are you and your colleagues adapting to these changes?

Abbey Carter Logan:

the pandemic? That's a great question. We actually didn't do telehealth prior to the pandemic and here in columbus, ohio, we locked down on march 13th. I remember that date clearly because my three-year-old stopped taking naps on that day and my partner and I said we're not going to survive if we don't create this telehealth platform for our business. So we took the weekend, we wrote a telehealth manual. We had lots of other business owners and practitioners collaborating to make this happen. Thankfully, we have a EHR system that integrates it, so it wasn't hard for us to get it up and running. We have a EHR system that integrates it, so it wasn't hard for us to get it up and running. By Monday we were doing telehealth sessions and I think it was a big learning curve for clinicians who weren't providing that prior to.

Abbey Carter Logan:

The pandemic. Sessions were different. The body language is different when you can only see this far up, and body language is a big part of mental health. When people are more nervous and I'm sure you experienced this in your practice too there's so much you can get from the body language of a person and we had to learn how to do that. Also, it's exhausting to be on a screen to see eight clients a day, most of our clinicians, including myself. Eight clients a day online most of our clinicians, including myself. Eight clients a day online it just is so draining Went down to really five feels like the max. When I was trained I did eight, nine, sometimes 10 clients in a day, nothing but a granola bar for lunch in between and that mm-mm. That's not. That cannot, no way. You will burn out immediately if you work that old way. So I think five clients max has been a big change. I think there's a lot more emphasis on self-care and taking time to really nourish and ground yourself outside of your work and ground yourself outside of your work Because I think what we learned during the pandemic too is you know, when we're going through that collective trauma altogether, you have the whole new skill of going through something that big with the clients who you're holding space for and you're processing simultaneously.

Abbey Carter Logan:

That's a whole different skill that we weren't taught in graduate school. So we had to learn in real time and I think, particularly with our clients, their expectations of that, I think, are different with the community we work with, especially because that's still happening for us, we're still in a major collective trauma, not that the pandemic is not still impacting everyone, because it is but I think the global political climate right now, especially in the United States, is really impacting us so much more. So we really, I think for clients, the expectations is having a safe space or a brave space, a space where they can come in and process, because the changes are happening in rapid succession and I don't think I don't see that slowing down, so they need time.

Abbey Carter Logan:

I think that the emphasis in our field has been more on self-care. In fact, the NASW of Ohio wrote it into their ethical code that you have to integrate self-care into your practice for yourself. But yeah, I think a lot of people working in other environments don't have that. So their expectation is to have that for one hour once a week or twice a month, that they really have that space where they can flop on the floor and cry or process what's happening, the fear and uncertainty of what's going to happen to their lives, because they're really they're fighting for their lives right now, every day, and it's hyper alert. I listened to another one of your podcasts talking about the cortisol steal and that's happening. So, yeah, I don't know if that answers your question. No, it does.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

Thank you. It's interesting perspective on the pandemic, interesting about the fact that eight appointments online were more draining than eight appointments perhaps in person, which is probably a little feels a little counterintuitive to some people because you might think, well, if you're in a room with somebody there may be more transference of what's going on with them and it might be more of a strain. But it's interesting that you say that strain on the therapist comes through even online therapist comes through even online.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

Yeah, so I was going to ask you what's working really well for you and your colleagues in the clinic and what sort of systems or approaches are really really clicking with you and your clients.

Abbey Carter Logan:

That's a great question. Let me sit with that for a minute.

Abbey Carter Logan:

So I do think what's working is authenticity. I think, especially in clinical mental health setting, it's really the changes come from the relationship. It's not about the approach. It's more about relationship with your therapist and your therapist's perspective being a model of a regulated nervous system. So we have to bring our calm to this. If we don't bring our calm and we're in panic with our clients, their mirror neurons are going to match that and they're already in panic. So our job really right now is to be the calming presence while holding space for them to freak out and then mirror us.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

if that makes sense, yeah, uh, so we have to really hold that ground just talking about in general what's working well for you and your colleagues in the clinic yes, yeah.

Abbey Carter Logan:

so self-care and rest, I think is working really well when we can take it. Um, we went on a canoeing trip a couple of weeks ago and just had fun together. I think that having fun and joyful, the clinicians we went on this canoe trip and partners could come and really building that community. I think community is the big piece of it is that we have shared community. Community is the big piece of it is that we have shared community and we have a weekly supervision group for folks who are dependently licensed, which is kind of like oh, what's the word I'm looking for? It's just their training license, so they're licensed, but they're getting supervision. They have a weekly meeting. We have a lot more supervision than most private practices provide.

Abbey Carter Logan:

Because we want that support and community, we just hired a couple of new clinicians and we had a pizza party and everybody came and ate pizza. We laugh together and I think the more genuine and authentic we can be together, the more we can show up for our clients. So that's working. I do think joy is a huge thing right now. That's working if we can find it, and what I've been working with with my clients is what are? What are the glimmers or the sparkles, because there's so much shit it could just you just cover the whole thing, but there are sparkles in there. What are the? What are the micro moments that are happening in your life that you can really sit with and savor, that nourish you, um, and really build up that sense of joy in their lives, because without joy we won't survive true, and on the flip side, what's sort of been the most frustrating or challenging lately in the day-to-day operations of your practice?

Abbey Carter Logan:

I actually wrote this out because it is really hard, I think, um, to survive as a practice, especially an insurance-based practice, we do have to diversify our services, but we also have to create the time, the labor, the space, the money to do that. While we are still seeing clients fostering a work culture and community supervising the clinical work of practitioners while fostering their well-being in the workplace and also looking at the global and the federal and the state and the city changes that are happening, it's so hard. That's not even the financial pieces and the legal and the ethical pieces. Yeah, I think that it's really really frustrating and hard to be serving our own community while they're going through it and also trying to create more joy and love and community to bolster each other, and that part's not frustrating. But having the time, the money and the space to part's not frustrating. But having the time, the money and the space to do that is frustrating.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

If you had a magic wand that could fix one thing in your business overnight, what would that be?

Abbey Carter Logan:

Probably increasing our pay and getting PTO, Because the way we're paid by insurance we actually currently cannot offer PTO. We offer unlimited take the time you need off, but it's not paid. If I could give all my people four to six weeks of paid time off and give them more money, I wish I could pay them all a million dollars, because what they're doing matters so much agreed.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

I'm going to ask you. So I don't know, is anybody else doing what you do locally or more nationally in the states, because you obviously have a very sort of niche interest with the queer and transgender community? Is anybody else taking this on as a kind of a specialist clinic sort of thing, and does that mean that you're exceptionally busy because everybody's being drawn towards what you do with your approach?

Abbey Carter Logan:

I would say in in our local community there's a lot of solo practitioners doing what we're doing in terms of treating the trans and queer community. We're so grateful for them. Many of them started off working here and have gone off and started their own things, so there are solo practitioners doing it. There are a few private practices who are smaller than us doing this work. So, yes, we're very busy and we're one of the only ones that take Medicaid um, because clinicians can't survive on the reimbursement for Medicaid, especially, you know, trying to create accessibility and they pay you less for telehealth sessions, but that I don't want to digress into that Um, but uh, of course I lost my train of thought when I digressed into that cause it makes me so angry. What was the question?

Dr Andrew Greenland:

again, Just talking about you having this niche sort of interest in what? You do and whether you know, being one of the few people that do this, mean that you have a sort of massive following massive demand for your services.

Abbey Carter Logan:

I'm just kind of curious to get a sense of what's going on in this space more nationally, yeah yeah, there is a clinic that's here and also I believe they're in Pittsburgh called Central Outreach and that's a health clinic health clinic that's doing this work for general health, pcp kind of stuff and hormones and those kinds of things, and and we have a direct partnership with them so they can just refer us people regardless if we're on a wait list, we'll we'll prioritize our people and get them in as quickly as we can. Um. I know nationally there are other practices doing this Um and it really varies state to state how they're doing it, but locally and in the state of Ohio there's few of us. There are some. Cleveland, cincinnati, some of the bigger cities have other practices that are doing what we're doing.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

So I mean, if you had a massive surge of referrals next week, what would be the first thing that would break or strain or put the clinic under pressure?

Abbey Carter Logan:

That's a great question. So we do constantly have a wait list because there is a lot of demand for our services and right now we just hired five new people since May. No six because we have another one starting in October. So that is, for now, taking care of that. But if we had an influx of people I think we could handle it up to 100 people. We used to have a waitlist of 100 people all the time.

Abbey Carter Logan:

We don't currently because we have those new clinicians, but that's not always going to work. So that's really why we form those community partnerships, so we have people we trust to refer to. I'm not really thinking about what would break us, because I've been thinking so hard about what will sustain us and keep us going and keep our doors open. I don't want to think about what would break us, but you know, if all these people came in and they didn't have insurance and Medicaid gets busted and they need pro bono services. We have a big heart. We offer a lot of sliding fee scale when we can, but we also have to sustain the business so that it sustains our clinicians.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

So it's a tricky balance. Of course, I think I was coming from the kind of the nice problem to have if you had this massive influx of patients who could afford what they needed to afford for the service. It always sounds like a nice problem until you can't necessarily you have the infrastructure to cope with it. I just wonder if there's anything that would stop you from coping with a massive influx. Now I have to sit with this because I it was just more of a rhetorical question, I guess.

Abbey Carter Logan:

I know I really want to sit with that and think about that, because I think we would, because I think we would one. We're just hiring people as much as we can. We're going to run out of space eventually and have to get more space to house and see more clients. Yeah, you know it's interesting too, dr Greenland. We've never marketed our services. We've never had to, because my business partner was so well known in the community that people have been sending us. We know a lot of the medical practitioners who work with the queer and trans community and we have this waitlist simply by word of mouth, which is wild. So when we do start marketing, that might happen, which is wild.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

So when we do start marketing, that might happen. Okay, looking back, if you were to start Clintonville counseling all over again, is there anything that you would do differently from the beginning based on, you know, your knowledge and experience of doing this for a number of years?

Abbey Carter Logan:

Mm. Hmm, I think I would have had a business plan. Business plan, you know, we're practitioners, we're not business people. And yeah, I would. I would have maybe studied up on business more and had a business plan Also. I think I would have also gotten more leadership training, because as a leader, I had no idea how much of my own stuff would be reflected in how I led other clinicians. I'm a person who doesn't really like authority, so it was really hard to be in a position of authority, and so I had. There's a great organization here called the Ohio Rest Collective, who I have gotten leadership coaching from, and I also work with a level up leaders coaching. I wish I would have known about them. The day I started here, I also didn't realize that I was going to have to be such a leader, so I wish I would have known that too.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

And finally, looking ahead to the next six of six or twelve months, what are you most excited about? Do you have any particular goals that you and your team are working towards?

Abbey Carter Logan:

yeah, I am most excited about offering more programs, more support groups uh, we have a dungeon dragons therapeutic group and building on those kind of things, more creative ideas. I think we finally have the space to get really creative with the programming we offer that can really be queer centered. I'm also really excited about our new leadership structure because it allows me to really look at the bigger picture and be able to do this podcast with you and things like that get our name out there in other ways and also having positions for folks to step into so that clinicians aren't just seeing clients but they get to be clinical directors or lead clinicians, because I think that makes them feel better and when they feel better and more grounded, they're better able to give really excellent clinical work and support to their clients. And so I'm excited about that. And I'm excited about the community building aspect and being able to do more in the community but also provide that community for our clients here at Clintonville Counseling and Wellness.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

Amazing. Abby, thank you so much for your time this afternoon. It's been really interestingly inspiring hearing about what you do, your approach. You're offering something really special for your people. So I'm really grateful for talking to me this afternoon, really appreciate it.

Abbey Carter Logan:

Oh, thank you so much, dr Greenland. I appreciate talking with you. I just love talking about this, so it made me really happy to sit here with you and I appreciate all your kind words.

Dr Andrew Greenland:

Wonderful Thank you.