Total Health & Wellness Associates, PLLC

06/15/2026

📢📢📢
Many people don't realize how fragile access to mental health care already is.

Across Michigan, families often wait weeks or months for appointments, and many communities continue to experience a shortage of mental health providers. Unfortunately, a recent Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan policy change could make that problem even worse.

Beginning in 2027, many limited-license mental health professionals will no longer be able to provide services to BCBS members under the current model. While these clinicians work under supervision and are fully qualified to provide therapy, this change could force many clients to change therapists or lose access to care altogether.

At a time when:
✅ Mental health waitlists remain long
✅ Michigan continues to face a provider shortage
✅ Families are already struggling to find care

This policy could make access even more difficult.

As a mental health practice owner, I've seen firsthand how important these clinicians are in serving children, adults, couples, first responders, veterans, and families throughout our communities. This isn't just a therapist issue—it's an access-to-care issue.

If you believe people should be able to continue seeing the therapist they've built trust with, please consider taking a few minutes to:

📞 Contact your state legislators
📧 Reach out to the Governor's office
📢 Share this post to help raise awareness

Sign the Change.org petition: [https://c.org/2pPJLcqYNt](https://c.org/2pPJLcqYNt?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAYnJpZBEyU2VRUEdiUjd0RGxkT3BucXNydGMGYXBwX2lkEDIyMjAzOTE3ODgyMDA4OTIAAR6XN0vFIzhOyLRlORo3spQ5O8t4xADI-_UezpWiaufTKkaiVtwJIbazlguauw_aem_b7VTyBz_MWss21_tWkHbQQ)

Mental health care works best when people can access treatment before they reach a crisis. Policies that reduce provider availability move us in the wrong direction.

Thank you for helping us advocate for accessible mental health care in Michigan.

Stop BCBSM's From Restrictions on Limited Licensed Mental Health Therapists

06/08/2026

Another announcement that healthcare providers and the general public would benefit from questioning and gaining full understanding of the implications.

For those who receive care from independent practitioners and small businesses, there are huge threats to sustainability in these settings. The clinicians you know, rely upon, and care about may quickly become inaccessible if there isn’t significant push back to the monopolies being created by the large insurance companies, who gate keep which providers are able to provide care that is covered by insurance.

/PRNewswire/ -- CAQH, the trusted data connector at the core of healthcare, announced that it is now owned by twelve shareholder companies affiliated with the...

06/08/2026

Healthcare professionals and the general public need to be aware of these changes. In this instance, BCBSM is the largest insurance payer in the State of Michigan. Their policy change announcement from last week impacts students, clinicians in training and those who have limited licenses, along with patients who will lose access to many trainees and limited licensed providers - not just in mental health, but across all health disciplines - if this policy change is not reversed or significantly revised. BCBSM continues to present themselves as innovative and collaborative, all in the service of improved health outcomes. Yet, this policy will lead to many of their members losing access to care. Stay informed and advocate if you feel called to do so.

06/04/2026

It often takes a lot of UNlearning to move into a space where one individual no longer feels responsible for another’s feelings, even when the other makes desperate attempts to convince the individual that such is the case.

What have you done to UNlearn this pattern, if it is a pattern that is familiar to you?

06/04/2026

“…verdicts can be overturned.” Yes!👏

I’ve worked with trauma for over 30 years, and one of the hardest things to help people trust is that their pain still counts when “nothing really happened.”

They come in carrying something heavy and spend the first ten minutes apologizing for it.

“I know this is stupid.” “Other people had it so much worse.” “It wasn’t even a big deal.”

But the body doesn’t measure pain by how dramatic it looked from the outside.

It remembers the moment you reached out as yourself and were met with shame instead of care. It remembers the silence afterward, when someone could have repaired the rupture, protected you, or helped you understand what happened — and didn’t.

It’s rarely just one moment, either. Usually it’s the same kind of moment, again and again, with no one ever coming back to make it right.

Sometimes we only remember the one that broke through — but it was standing on top of a hundred others.

That’s where so many people quietly decide they’re the problem. And without realizing it, they begin organizing so much of their lives around that belief: what they hide, what they apologize for, what they stop asking for, and how much of themselves they let other people see.

Make no mistake: that belief was never a fact about you. It was a verdict you reached as a child, with no one there to help you question it.

And verdicts can be overturned.

06/01/2026

From a self-described psychologist on Facebook who describes something that we often discuss with patients who would describe their childhoods as being “typical” or “normal,” and often don’t see the ways in which key components were missing to support of their development:

“I'm a psychologist and I can always tell when someone grew up too fast.
Not because they tell me.
Because of what they never learned to do.

Here are 7 signs:

1.
They are extraordinarily capable.
Competent in ways that took most people decades.
They handle things.
They figure things out.
They don't wait to be rescued.
That's not a personality trait.
That's a child who learned very early that waiting didn't work.

2.
They find it almost impossible
to ask for help without first proving they've already tried everything.
Not because they're proud.
Because needing something
before you've exhausted yourself first still feels like a failure.
They learned that before they could name it.

3.
Play feels foreign.
Not uncomfortable exactly.
Just slightly out of reach.
Like there's a glass between them and the ability to just be
somewhere without it meaning anything or producing anything
or going anywhere.
They watched other children do it.
They weren't sure they were allowed.

4.
They are the responsible one.
In every group.
Every relationship.
Every room.
Not because they chose it.
Because someone has to be
and they have been practicing
since they were eight years old.
By now it just feels like
who they are.

5.
Rest still feels like something they have to earn.
Not tired-guilty.
Something older than that.
A voice that says:
you don't get to stop yet.
There's still something that needs handling.
There is always something
that needs handling.

6.
They grieve things they can't quite name.
A childhood they were present for but somehow not in.
Summers that were fine.
A family that was fine.
And still this quiet sense of having missed something they can't go back for.
They don't know if they're allowed to call it loss.
It was fine.
It just cost them something
nobody saw.

7.
When something is genuinely hard their first response is to get practical.
What needs to be done.
What can be controlled.
What can be managed.
Feeling it comes later.
Sometimes much later.
Sometimes in the car three weeks after when there's finally nothing left to handle.

Nobody sat them down and told them to grow up.
The situation did.
A parent who was struggling.
A home that needed managing.
A family that needed someone
to hold it together.
And they were there.
And they were capable.
And no one noticed what it cost a child to be that capable
that young.

Somewhere inside them
there is still a kid who never got to just be a kid.
Who learned to need very little.
To handle everything.
To keep going.
That kid deserved more.
So do you.

—talktotessa”

05/18/2026

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