Dr Nina D Farley-Bates, LCSW

I have over 25 years’ experience with counseling, psychotherapy and positive change through lifestyle health. By helping my patients learn to connect to their inner selves and their brain-body connection I have found the tools that help people move toward wellness. When I graduated from University of California, Berkeley and started really working with people, I quickly began to see how reliant the medical profession was on pharmacology to “resolve” people’s problems. And although many people do benefit from antidepressant / antianxiety medications, few find recovery by only taking medication. I found for those with poor lifestyle habits and adverse experiences as children or adults, medication alone is not the answer. Through my years of practice I’ve too often I witnessed patients overmedicated and getting worse because they continued to eat a SAD (Standard American Diet); they often lived sedentary lives; many were overusing substances cope; most were sleeping lousy; virtually all were highly stressed and struggling with painful unsupportive love relationships. I just listed the 6 domains of lifestyle health that have been proven to determine not only the quality of life but the quantity of years we spend on this planet. The most important lifestyle health factors to living long healthy lives are: Activity (more moving less sitting), food (whole food nutrition), substance use (less smoking, drinking, using), restful restorative sleep, better ways of managing unavoidable stress, and love (positively connecting with ourselves and others). As I was completing my doctorate, during my clinical application of the academic work, I became interested in all the ways I could help motivate my patients through Behavioral Activation to take their emotional health back by improving these 6 areas of lifestyle health. As I focused on the relationship between Diabetes and Depression, I found like so many other researchers have, that my patient's A1C percentage was directly correlated with their levels of self-reported depression and anxiety. And those who improved their lifestyle health in these 6 areas, lowered their A1c. Those that ignored their unhealthy habits, had death defyingly high A1Cs, hence the more debilitating their depression and anxiety was. My mind-body lesson for diabetes was that it is a “depressionogenic disease.” I began to see that even with those who didn't have diabetes, there were strong correlations between poor lifestyle health, depression and anxiety. Another vicious cycle emerged when I worked with those who psychiatry would call "treatment resistant" who had untreated and active Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms. Pills alone and even behaviorally focused change (like CBT) didn’t make trauma disappear. I saw people with PTSD caught in a vicious cycle of trauma symptoms that were weighing them down to such an extent they found it nearly impossible to replace self-sabotaging lifestyles with those habits leading to feelings of happiness. Over the years, I’ve learned that severe trauma and motivation to change are inextricably intertwined. In short, the bodies and brains of people with PTSD needed to become healthy step-by-step together as their traumas were recognized and resolved.