Today we’d like to introduce you to Lisa Tensmeyer Hansen.
Hi Lisa, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
A decade ago, I was nearing the finish line of daily mom-ness, having raised seven kids plus a few extras. That’s when I really started noticing what a bad job we were doing as a community including LGBTQ+ people.
And why?! They were not only like the rest of us in all the best ways, but they were also often more talented, funnier, more thoughtful, and a heckuva lot more aware of people around them than most straight cis folx.
My first vision was a gay men’s choir, and I found some great support for it, and loved rehearsing and watching the choir perform for five years before I went back to school to get a Masters and Ph.D. in Marriage and Family Therapy. This was before gay marriage was legal, but I knew I wanted to raise gay voices and contribute to legitimizing full participation in society, and I hoped that MFT training would allow me to help with that.
In 2017, near the end of my Ph.D., I organized Flourish Counseling, which was sponsored at the time by Encircle Youth and Family Resource Center. We were able to offer low-cost and often free therapy for people who needed it. Then I in 2019, we became a nonprofit (Flourish Therapy Inc) so that we could continue to offer free and low-cost therapy to LGBTQ+ individuals, couples, and families.
Flourish now employs 30 therapists, associates, and interns (and a nurse practitioner) to serve the mental and behavioral health needs of individuals, couples, and families dealing with the intersection of LGBTQ+ issues and LDS cultural/family issues. Flourish has provided more than 23,000 sessions of therapy, has added more than 700 new clients in the past year, and has more than 200 people on our waitlist (who we hope to have assigned in the next six weeks).
We have no corporate partners yet, so we rely on individual donors and interested foundations to make up the difference every month of about $18,000. So far, we have been able to keep our doors open and keep people receiving the help they need.
I love this work, these clients, these therapists, and our wonderful staff, and don’t mind the 70 hours per week it takes right now to offer this kind of help. I hope someday the major stressors in these clients’ lives will be eliminated, and our whole society will be better off.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle-free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
No! In May 2019, we lost our major sponsor, who wanted to go in a different direction. We had thirteen therapists and several hundred nonpaying clients at the time. Our nonprofit status wasn’t granted for another six months, so that period of time was touch-and-go.
It would have been easy to quit at that point. We had all the needs and not a single dollar guaranteed. What was amazing was that all of our therapists stayed on board and continued to see Flourish clients at borrowed locations, even though we had no income at the time.
That’s the level of dedication we have to our work! The larger LGBTQ+ community and allies must have seen that too. They stepped up and gave us enough support to get through that difficult six months. When we finally were awarded 501(c)(3) nonprofit status, it became possible to apply for other grants and donations. It’s never been easy though.
Every month we have to brainstorm where the next donations might come from. And every month, people and foundations seem to find us and offer us help. I love seeing the people who are able to help a few dollars a month. It reminds me that we are doing the frontline work. I have to say, that having fantastic therapists has been the smoothest, most wonderful part of the journey. Therapists who are passionate about working with LGBTQ+ folx seem to show up and are eager to do good work.
Great people to work with make this job rewarding, along with our amazing clients.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
Hmm. What else to tell you… Maybe about some of the challenges that got me here?
I grew up in Indianapolis in the mid-1970’s when racial segregation was still acceptable in schools, clubs, and swimming pools. When my high school was integrated and became the subject of busing from the inner-city, white students fled to private schools. Those of us who stayed had the experience of learning to pay attention to people different from us.
Adults around me in church and politics were asserting at the time that segregation was a right connected to religious freedom. They believed they had a religious right not to treat some other people as equals. It was tied up in fear of interracial marriage, and for LDS folx, pressure to let black people in LDS temples. I became convinced instead that the best parts of my religion compelled me to imagine others as myself, and to imagine myself in their lives, considering how I might feel if I had their history, constraints, and yearnings.
These thoughts fueled my ongoing concerns about belonging and the importance of considering others as important as myself over the next several decades. Meanwhile, I married at 19 and started having children right away. I never stopped taking college classes, however, and by taking one or two classes every semester, I finally graduated in August 1990 as a BYU University valedictorian when I was 8 months pregnant with baby #5. My parents couldn’t travel to see me graduate, and my kids were too young, so only my husband could attend my graduation speech, but I spoke boldly about the things that mattered to me: belonging and learning the life lessons of deeply listening to each other.
It was intimidating twenty years later, to return to the university at 50 years old, but I knew what I wanted to do, (raise LGBTQ+ voices and generate equal treatment in all areas of life) and I believed that getting mental health training and earning advanced degrees was the only way to do it.
I’d had my own mental health issues over my lifetime, trying to figure out basic things like: Will erasing myself for other people make me happy? If I don’t like something my husband is doing, should I say something or stuff it? When I’m really upset about something, what should I do? Am I demonstrating good mental health to my kids to always put myself last? Is it better for me to talk about myself with other people, or just be a good listener? What should I do with social anxiety and awkwardness? When is selfishness OK?
I knew I would enjoy studying mental health, so I just rolled with being old. The twenty and thirty-somethings in my program seemed to be OK with me too.
In addition to the courses in my MFT program, I took women’s studies courses, sang in the women’s choir, and worked in the Women’s Services office. My master’s thesis won a national award (AAMFT) and I also won an award for supervising counseling psych students from the University of Utah. I finished my Master’s Degree in 2013 and my Ph.D. in 2017.
Since graduation, I continue to educate the public and other professionals about LGBTQ+ issues. Conducting or supervising over 15,000 sessions of therapy with LGBTQ+ individuals, couples, and families has helped me be aware of what the community wants and needs to know in order to help us all thrive together. My curriculum vitae lists more than 100 presentations, to universities, professional organizations, and community meetings about LGBTQ+ mental health issues.
Now more about Flourish Therapy. A necessary piece of training for a therapist to be able to offer counseling at Flourish is trauma-informed practice. Most clients have experienced socio-cultural trauma and need a practitioner who understands that and is ready to hold and treat that trauma. Other kinds of typical cultural experiences in our world occur first within some kind of safe space where children’s shared cultural identity is cherished, celebrated, and promoted, and where traditions illustrate the culture’s meaning in family, religion, school, or community.
However, LGBTQ+ young people grow up only gradually recognizing that they are alien to the primary cultures that surround them in family, religion, school, and community. They often spend years trying to fit into that culture before they are brave enough to speak up about what is really happening inside of them, and at that point, families often push back in unhelpful ways, expressing that they haven’t seen this behavior or belief before, or that the young person should still aim to fit into the family’s culture.
These experiences can generate socio-cultural trauma for the young person and for the family.
In addition, LGBTQ+ couples often don’t get the support from the community, family, and religion that straight cisgender couples receive. Queer couples also experience socio-cultural trauma as they try to forge healthy relationships as pioneers in our world.
At Flourish, we have therapists who support these couples’ relationships, as well as therapists who work with families. We have therapists who identify as trans, gay, lesbian, bi, ace, and genderqueer.
Perhaps it is surprising that even though we treat a lot of young people and their families, most of our clients are adults, Adults have often experienced socio-cultural trauma that has played out over their growing up years, their education, their early careers, and their family life. They also appreciate the support that mental/behavioral health treatment provides.
A large percentage of our clients deal with chronic or acute suicidal ideation. Utah’s suicide prevention plan lists expanding access to behavioral health as one of our first tasks in preventing suicide. That’s the work our therapists are doing. We help clients find ways of contributing to life and celebrating their best pathways forward.
Flourish offers teletherapy all over the state of Utah and in our offices in South Jordan and in Orem. We also recently have obtained license to see clients in five states other than Utah, and are currently applying for more state licenses because we have gotten requests from clients in these other states who do not have access to affordable services from therapists who understand these particular pressures.
We offer internships to grad students in counseling, social work, and MFT programs at local and online universities, and we respond to requests from local hospitals for follow-up work with inpatient clients. I’m most proud of the great work our therapists and staff do to support thriving in the LGBTQ+ community.
If you had to, what characteristic of yours would you give the most credit to?
Believing in people. Believing that when they get the support they need, they will thrive and give back. Listening to people. Believing they have more for me to understand than I can ever know. Being certain about advocacy, uncertain about being personally right about anything. Being human and celebrating the humanity of everyone around me. Believing that our flaws make us lovable.
Never give up.
Pricing:
- We provide about 1000 sessions of therapy every month, and more than 200 of these are provided free to clients each month.
- The base price of a therapy session is $160, but 75% of clients pay $50 or less
- We take several insurance plans and offer a sliding scale for everyone else
- 30% of our costs are covered by insurance, 53% by client payments, and 17% by donors
- You can access our therapy application and a donor button on our website at www.flourishtherapy.org
Contact Info:
- Email: info@flourishtherapy.org
- Website: www.flourishtherapy.org
- Instagram: @flourishtherapyinc
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/flourishtherapyinc
- Other: https://www.facebook.com/lisa.t.hansen
