Lisa VanHolsbeke

Lisa has been a licensed therapist in Arizona since 2007, with a unique background and heart to support first responders because she is an EMT and retired law enforcement officer herself. Lisa is passionate about helping first responders stay strong by building resilience, learning more emotional coping tools to get better outcomes at work and at home, and occasionally needing a safe environment to "off-load" some of the intrusive effects of traumatic incidents. During her 26-year career in federal law enforcement, she investigated and supervised difficult cases such as child exploitation which can take an emotional toll. She also worked many special, high intensity assignments as a firearms instructor, special response team (SRT) operator, and tactical EMT. She has also responded to many critical incidents, including suicides, officer deaths, natural disasters, mass casualty events, and the Oklahoma City bombing. She has first-hand experience with the cumulative nature of critical incidents, both everyday ones as well as large-scale traumatic incidents. This motivated her to go back to school to complete her master’s degree in counseling to provide the clinical support which was not available to her during her law enforcement career. For the last two and a half years, Lisa has worked as an operational field clinician for a large federal law enforcement agency, trying to de-stigmatize mental health care, build resiliency, and support employees after traumatic incidents. Prior to that she worked at Jewish Family and Children’s Services in Tucson, working primarily with first responders and clients diagnosed with complex trauma. She uses various modalities including Solution-Focused Therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy, Group Therapy, Faith-based Therapy, Mindfulness Therapy, Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM), etc.