Jen Milau, APRN, PMHNP-BC
{click here for official bio}Since I was a young child, I have maintained a deep connection to my intuition. As a young person trying to understand my place in the world, I struggled to balance this inner knowing with the what the world around me seemed to value. This dichotomy between my authentic self and the one that so desperately craved belonging created a friction in me. That friction manifested as chronic pain, unexplained illnesses, and spiritual disconnection.
Like so many of the people I now help, I grew accustomed to expecting dismissiveness from healthcare providers. These providers couldn’t offer any rationale for my symptoms and rather than explore more deeply, labeled me as being “psychosomatic.” While this term is often use negatively, it is ironically one of the clearest descriptors of the mind-body connection that we have available to us in conventional medicine!
As a young adult, I used academia and endless knowledge-seeking as a way of coping with the “bigness” of what I was experiencing. Cortisol drove me, and I convinced myself that if I could only learn more, contribute more, do more, I would find whatever it was that I was lacking. The more time I spent on this path that strayed so far from my true soul’s purpose, the more my body cried out with demands for me to pay attention and stop. I ended up experiencing treatment-resistant cancer, autoimmunity, and eventually, an unexplainable set of neurological symptoms made it impossible for me to work for a period of time.
It was in this humbling, raw, and deeply humanizing season of my life that I was forced to surrender my ego and the coping mechanisms that I had relied upon to “survive” up to that point. I took a pause and retreated from the endless “root cause” search for answers to my physical problems; instead, I learned about new ways of tending to myself, including energy work, and I returned to nature through gardening, spending endless hours with the soil, the bees, and the earthworms each day. It was like coming home to myself after so long away, and it solidified my understanding that I was meant to bring forth this wisdom to my community.
I’m honored to bring forth my lived experiences, my clinical intuition, and my scientific knowledge as I help others to find new ways of addressing their own disconnection and struggle. I feel so incredibly lucky to get to walk this path with you.
With more than a decade dedicated to the mental health field, Jen has worked with individuals of diverse backgrounds and ages and at all levels of care. Her early career followed a conventional and highly academic path, marked by service on nationally renowned teams within large healthcare networks that valued excellent performance and measurable clinical outcomes. She made meaningful contributions within the field of psychoneuroimmunology and she challenged her fellow clinicians to consider new and deeper ways of looking at traditional psychiatric care. The work was important. But in a system built upon ever-increasing productivity demands and reductionist models of health, she was faced with the reality that authentic, whole-person healing would not be possible within the constraints of traditional medicine.
Jen transitioned into private practice so that she could chart an alternative path more aligned with her core beliefs: that nature and community hold incredible restorative powers; that play and creativity are not “leisure” but crucial elements of personhood; humans have an innate capacity to heal; that trauma disrupts the connection among our physical, emotional, and spiritual bodies; and that unlocking this wisdom requires attention and nurturing to all parts within these complex systems.
Jen’s clinical process is guided by intuition, grounded in science, and most importantly, tailored to the individual. She takes a warm, relational approach, where the space is considered reverent and the client is an informed and active partner in creating their personal treatment plan.
Her modalities are varied and include elements of medication management (both pharmacological options as well as supplements and natural plant remedies), examination of lab review if indicated (including genetic testing to support medication decision making), mindfulness and meditation, and exploration of spirituality and connectedness.
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