Featured Clinician Interview: Dr. Parie Faridnia
/OC Shrinks is a mental health digital space and networking group that believes the best way to uplift professionals in the field is to provide space for connection, collaboration, and community!
We had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Parie Faridnia
Dr. Parie Faridnia is a licensed psychologist, president of Dr. Parie Psychological Services, Inc., as well as co-founder of OC Family Wellness Group collaborative. She is also a registered play therapist supervisor, registered yoga teacher, and president of the California Association for Play Therapy. She enjoys training and supervising pre-licensed professionals. She specializes in treating highly sensitive children, perinatal mood and anxiety disorders, and crisis assessment/intervention.
Connect with Dr. Parie at:
We are hiring 2 licensed therapists to join our family-style group practice:
http://www.ocfamilywellnessgroup.com/careers.html
If interested, please email ocfwgroup@gmail.com with your Resume/CV!
For more information about the highly sensitive person trait please go to: https://hsperson.com/
Interview Transcript
Tell us a little bit more about you and your practice -
My name's Dr. Parie. I specialize in working with children, teens, families, also with perinatal mood and anxiety disorders and stress needs any time in the post-partum or prenatal period. And so I'm helping new parents and parents that just are struggling with any of these things too. So I also really love working with parents as well and supporting parents, but I also work alongside my team. So I have a group practice, and we have a number of different therapists who work with me, and they all have different specialties, but mostly, we specialize in working with children, teens and families, but we do have an adult therapist as well. He is amazing with adults, with college students, with the young adult population, as well as the rest of the community, Dr. Nader.
I just wanted to share a little bit about that. And also we just have a great team. I also work alongside another psychologist, Dr. Chavez, and she has her team as well. So, together, we form OC Family Wellness Group, and we've gone out to the community over the last few years and just really tried to network and just get to know the community around us. That's really what we are all about, is community and getting to know everyone, all the different providers, to let them know that we're here, but also we like to know what they have to offer too, so we can know, because we have clients from all different walks of life who need different things.
How is your approach different or unique from others?
Another one of the specialties is working with highly sensitive people, and that's not a disorder, I just wanted to put that out there. It's actually a trait, and it's something that you're born with. It's a temperament. It's a sensory processing sensitivity. And actually 20% of the global population has this trait, and anywhere you are in the world, 20%, it's one in five. And a lot of people don't know about this, so we really like to really screen every single client we see for this trait, because it really informs treatment. And a lot of clients we see coming through the door will have maybe a different type of diagnosis, maybe it doesn't really quite fit them, and we really like to screen for this trait because it actually can explain some of the struggles they are experiencing.
What being highly sensitive means, just really quickly, is you experience more, so all the different stimuli like light or all the different senses that you have, everything's louder. And also emotions can be louder, you feel more, you have big feelings, and it's just you take in more so you can become overwhelmed and overstimulated more easily. So, again, it's not a disorder, but it can go along with anxiety and depression, and things like that, 'cause people feel misunderstood. So we really like working with these clients to help them better understand themselves first, who they are, at their core. Before we get started on all the disorders and all the different problems that came about, we really want to know who they are at their core and helping them get back to finding out who they are at their core. It's been so hard this past year, and in general. It's so hard to really be in touch with your true self. And I would say that myself and all of the clinicians that work with me are all really talented at helping people come back to themselves.
What kind of clients do you work with? Is there a certain age or gender? What does that look like?
So sensitive's a trait, it is something that you're born with, but it depends on your environment as well. So, yes, we kind of know, as clinicians, but also just in the world that it's both nature and nurture that really inform personality and development. And so the nature part is a genetic part, which is... It is genetic, the trait is genetic. If you have the trait, then most likely one or both of your parents has the trait too, so they pass it along to you. But it depends on your environment. If your environment is support this development of being someone who just really experiences the world in a louder way, and needs more support around transitions and needs more support around just getting through the world that's not made for people that are highly sensitive, if you have good support with that, then you may not notice it as much because... You might be aware of it, but it may not plague you as much, so you may not notice it as much, or it might also be... Your environment might also go against that. So it might... You might say, "You're being too sensitive. You're being too this. You're being too that." And then they kind of shut it down, shut it down, shut it down.
Like you were mentioning, Amber, sometimes it does take into adulthood to really realize what this is, and to really understand what this is. And it's not because there's something wrong with you. It's just because this is a part of you, and this is something you need to nurture and come to terms with. It doesn't mean... Being highly sensitive, by the way, does not mean you can't be strong, or a leader, or someone that really is successful in life. What it does mean is it's just a part of you that you need to honor and channel. That's what we like to do with our clients, is help to channel this part of themselves so they can succeed and be their best selves in whatever they choose to do in their life.
It does have a bar, about earlier in life, but it doesn't mean you may not... You may not know about it. It depends on if you're in therapy or not begin therapy.
Because you don't really know. This trait was actually discovered. It's been around forever, but it's been discovered by Dr. Elaine Aron and her colleagues back in 1990, the late '80s, early '90s.
It hasn't been around that long, in the grand scheme of things. So, even for myself, I didn't know about this trait until about 12 years ago, I would say, and it explained so much for me, personally. I am a highly sensitive person, and I'm a highly sensitive therapist as well, and it really does explain so much, and so I always... For some people, it's like a big eye-opening experience when they come to work with me and my team because it's like, "Oh, I didn't know about this. This explains so much." What a great feeling, isn't it, to just know that part of yourself?
It's wonderful because I've worked with people of all different ages, people from the ages of 2 and 3, up until 50s, because sometimes they come to me specifically because of my expertise in this area, and they're just really, for the first time, getting to know themselves, and I think that is pretty... That happens a lot in therapy, in general, but sometimes you can focus so much on the problems, we're not really focusing on the person. And so that's what I say would differentiate us from different therapists out there, is that we really focus on the whole person. And I'm actually a Human Development major from undergraduate, so I started with learning about... At UC Davis. So I started learning about the person and how... Like typical development before I learned about disorders in psychology. So I think that all... That really just informs my treatment.
Talk to us about the patient journey. What can they expect from you when they choose to work with you?
Usually, someone will either email us or contact us. We have a variety of different ways. So they will contact us in some way, either by email, or they will call, or... And sometimes I'll call people back, but a lot of times, it's someone on my team who will call people back and... Or they're just calling and getting some more information about the case, and I understand, because I do have a group practice, we want to find out who might be the best fit.
I have my people on my team well-trained to know, "Okay, so this person is really good with this, this person is really good with that." And so that, basically, we really... We try to take care of people when they call us because we really understand how hard it is to reach out for support, and I've been hearing things like people aren't getting back to me, therapists aren't getting back to me, things like that. And there has been a lot of people that need help. We really do try to help the best that we can, and if we cannot help, we will refer out, because we are... If that is the case. We do have such a great, diverse team, but usually, we are able to help whatever walks through our door, but we also know our limitations, and we also know... Sometimes we know other people. That's why OC Shrink is so great because we know of other people. "Hey, you know what? I know this is their jam. I know this is something they're really good with." So, yeah, we... Whoever walks through our door... Just so people are aware, we do have a wide variety of fees as well. So, for our different therapists, we do have a sliding scale, and depending on income, and also we do take a few different insurance plans too.
We take MHN and Cigna and TRICARE and soon, soon, Pfizer, that we're in that process of getting insurance too with Pfizer. So we really... We also, of course, have our cash rates, and things like that, but we try to support the client, what they bring to the door with what they can... Yeah, what they can afford, what is feasible for them, without any shame, or anything like that. We really just want people to get the help that they need.
How can our community support you more?
I think just letting people know that, really, what we are all about is... And I'm also a yoga teacher, so I wanna put that in there. So I also will incorporate mindfulness strategies, yoga, even little... I have my little yoga bears behind me here. They do different poses. They're really flexible. They're called Meddy Teddies. But anyway...
We are working mostly virtual right now, but hope to return to the office in the near future, but right now, we are working virtually, but... So, just so people are aware of that. But we really... We have that special team working with highly sensitive children, people, in general, that trait, as well as those pair, mood and anxiety disorders. And know that we are all very focused on lifelong learning. So I'm very focused on training my staff on different modalities. And I'm always setting them with different trainings and different things, because we are all about learning.
We are continual learners. So, yeah, we do have that specialty, and we really enjoy helping people understand themselves better, understand their children better, so parents that are needing support. I think, because we're child therapists, mostly, mostly child and teen therapists, a lot of times, parents feel they can't reach out. What is their role? So, either we will work with them directly or we'll have someone on our team work with the parent if they feel uncomfortable, but we always are involving parents as well. So, we're sort of like a multi-faceted practice in the things we offer. And we do offer services in Mandarin, Taiwanese, Hebrew. And my colleagues' practice offer services, I believe, in Armenian, French. There's a couple of other languages as well.
We're trying to help clients access services in a way that works best for them.
How can people find you and reach out?
It's ocfamilywellnessgroup.com. So that's our website, and you can find more information like biographies, and all the different explanations on that site, as well as the different services that we provide. And we also have a Facebook page, which is OC Family Wellness Group, on Facebook, so you can find us on there and follow along.