Mandy Eppley, M.A., LPC, NCC, is a licensed psychotherapist and is a large part of the healing that occurs in the Soul Widows Organization. Her credentials in a snapshot are as follows.
Mandy has been in private practice since 1993 devoting herself to individuals struggling with the effects of depression, anxiety, grief, sexual abuse and trauma. She has also focused on couples and family therapy. Her emphasis is on teaching communication skills and dialogue techniques to help those in crisis. She has led and co-led numerous groups, workshops, and classes around themes such as self-esteem, grief and loss, personal empowerment, sexual abuse, communication and intimacy, and career and life visions. Mandy was also regularly featured on 107.9 The Link's Matt & Ramona Show, as "Counselor Mandy." Listeners had picked Mandy from a group of other candidates to be on the show, and for over two years, she headlined a regular segment where listeners called in to ask Mandy for her opinion, guidance, encouragement, and compassion on a wide variety of issues.
Mandy has also worked with birth mothers, adoptive families, and foster families for two years. She helped birth mothers with their grief as well as the families with the accreditation process and speaks from her heart about how these experiences have deepened her empathy for birth mothers and for the tremendous act of love that adoption truly is.
In addition to private practice, Mandy worked for seven years in executive coaching and career consulting in the United States and in Europe for a company called Anchors Consulting. It was her calling during this time to help people clarify their visions and give them the tools and confidence to go for their life’s dreams. Being able to do this, to meet people from all over the world only served to deepen her belief that people are people. She truly witnessed that people are as similar to each other as they are different from each other and the proof and continuity of this is reflected here as well as on the other side of the world. We truly are a world of souls, sometimes in need of help.
All of this sounds impressive for a resume, but it gives a far too sterile picture of the woman Mandy is and what she brings to the Souls Widows Organization. Mandy is far more than the sum of her credentials for she is a person who understands and empathizes with the souls she meets through her practice and through Soul Widows. The defining word in all of this is “souls.”
Mandy is the type of person who seems born to do what she does. It is her gift and she gives it to everyone she meets. Everyone Mandy meets is a soul worthy of her time and attention. She is a petite woman but inside her lives a powerful spirit whose passion, whose life has been committed to helping those who reach out to her. She even has the insight and intuitive awareness to reach out to those who may have a hard time asking for help with words. They may only be able to communicate with their body language, but Mandy can read that as well. It is that word again. Souls. Mandy knows how to read the human soul.
And it is her work with Soul Widows where the trueness and greatness of Mandy’s gift takes shape. She calls it her “sacred work.” Her work with grief and loss has been there from the beginning of her training. She believes her need to support, witness for, and acknowledge those in deep pain has been inside her since she was a child. Her heroes and heroines have been those who spent their lives and energy fighting for the justice of the heart and for every soul to live in full freedom. She says that Mandela, Joan of Arc, Gandhi, Jesus, Rumi, Mother Theresa, and others are her role models, but after meeting Mandy Eppley one can see that they are really her predecessors. Mandy lives her life following in their footsteps.
In affiliating herself with Soul Widows, Mandy has been helping people learn that their losses and the suffering that ensues is a unique gift. It is not a wound that will leave them bleeding indefinitely. Mandy can help show those who are hurting and deeply lost in the darkness of their sorrow that those wounds are also what helps to create who they are as human beings. She comes into the darkness with the light of her strength to sit with those who cannot find their way out and teaches them how to grieve in a fertile way, in a productive way, in a way that allows them to mine the treasure of their loss and to once again find the beauty of their soul. They do not have to stay in the despair that their great tragedy brought them to. Mandy can show them the way to acknowledge their pain and embrace it in a constructive way, how to communicate their feelings to their family and friends, and then to find the light of their own strength, to help them rise up from their sorrow and walk out of the darkness and back into their life.
Mandy has the ability to notice the smallest thing, like when someone hesitates over a word, or ever so quietly falls silent while sitting in a group. She is strong and brave and goes willingly, and joyfully, into the depths of grief to find someone sitting alone in their sorrow. She can find her way in the dark because she knows her way. Mandy has navigated herself through her own grief and sorrow and has the generosity and calling in her heart and soul to venture back into the darkness again and again searching for someone who hurts.
She speaks about acknowledging the pain. She speaks about accepting what has happened. She also speaks about the life left to live and live well. She teaches those who hurt how to arm their soul with their own truth and helps them find their voice. She is there to help the wounded embrace what has happened and make it a part of who they now are. Then she shows them how to rewrite their life’s story. She teaches those who grieve how to balance their anguish with joy. She is someone who joyfully interferes with those who are stuck in their grief. Mandy is the fiery woman with the powerful light of knowledge to help teach those in sorrow find their way out.
We are a culture that seems to have forgotten how to acknowledge and handle the grief of others and therefore, our own tragedies. Mandy feels it is her personal calling to help our culture understand what grief is, to create a new relationship with the necessary losses we must face, and to accept and deal with the tragic, unforeseen losses that can devastate our lives. She believes and teaches that if we try to alienate ourselves from our losses, from grieving, them we miss out on the treasure and blessings they bring from acknowledging what the loss meant to us. Isolating ourselves during our times of great despair can make us feel helpless and slow down our grieving until we may, ultimately, lose our way. We need to learn how to cope with our losses, and with the grief that it sparks inside us. Mandy Eppley is a teacher, a guide, and a companion on the road of grief. She has the knowledge she gently and lovingly shares to help find the way to healing. She is a woman worth knowing in an organization that deserves her empathy and compassion. Both Soul Widows and Mandy are the better for being united in this gift of healing.
