Julia Rodriguez is a Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner who has been practicing since 2012. She has an undergraduate degree in Anthropology from the College of Charleston and a Master’s degree in Nursing from the Medical University of SC.
Julia’s approach to wellness is integrative. She believes that the body/mind/spirit knows how to heal itself. Her approach to wellness is to help her clients learn to unlock their own innate source(s) of healing.
Where appropriate, she incorporates holistic approaches to wellness such as healthy foods, supplements, herbs, and/or amino acids to nourish deficiencies.
As an undergraduate studying Anthropology at the College of Charleston, Julia studied ethnobotany, learning the science of how people of a particular region make use of indigenous (native) plants for medical, religious, and other uses. Julia has had the great privilege of living and working with Indigenous healers in Mexico and learning about plant medicine from them.
Over the years in her practice as a mental health professional, she came to appreciate that a primary factor influencing whether or not her patients recovered was hinged on finding a sense of purpose and meaning in their suffering.
Throughout her career, Julia has worked with clients who suffer from a broad range of mental health disorders, including depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety disorders, PTSD, and schizophrenia.
She also works with clients struggling with overwhelming life difficulties such a terminal illness, the death of a loved one, the end of relationship, a career transition, or simply those with a desire to become their highest selves and seeking guidance in how to achieve that version of who they know they can be.
Julia’s goal is to assist her clients to regain control over their lives and rediscover their sense of purpose and joy. She works together with them to find the course of treatment that best supports their well-being and enhances their quality of life.
Julia is fluent in Spanish and has traveled extensively in Latin America and the Caribbean. She studied the practice of female genital mutilation while studying abroad in West Africa, traveling throughout Senegal, the Gambia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, conducting interviews with locals, to better understand the practice. While traveling in Panama, she documented how cultural perspectives of mental illness differ in Latin America and the US. She has studied dance in Guinea, West Africa, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba.
Julia worked at the VA hospital with traumatized veterans plagued with recurrent combat nightmares. She learned how dreams can be rescripted to cope with trauma, finally allowing old wounds to heal. She is skilled at dream interpretation and frequently helps her clients to understand insights they glean from their dreams, since dreams can sometimes be understood as a source of intuition and the psyche’s own seat of guidance.
Julia worked at the Crime Victims Center at the Medical University of SC. Funded by a grant from the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), she has worked with Hispanic women who were victims of domestic abuse or physical or sexual assault, helping them to get care for their trauma, and sometimes facilitating their being able to obtain a U-Visa, which offers legal protection for undocumented victims of a crime who come forward to denounce crimes committed against them.
Julia is passionate about understanding the complexities of the human psyche as is manifests in diverse cultural settings. She loves to visit mental health facilities around the world and has enjoyed consulting with with mental health care professionals at psychiatric hospitals in Costa Rica, Guinea, West Africa, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Dominican Republic. Learning how emotional distress manifests in a variety of cultural settings has been key in helping her better understand the human experience of suffering.
Outside of work, Julia is a Latin dance performer, a soccer player since childhood, and loves to take meditative walks and journal.
