Dr Melissa Franzen with Growth Abounds PLLC helping kids with her grief camp

Jeff Williams:
Welcome to Community Voices, a production of NPR Illinois. I'm your co-host, Jeff Williams. In the studio with me today, Melissa Franzen, Dr. Melissa Franzen. Did I say your last name correctly?
Dr. Melissa Franzen:
Yes, sir. I'm impressed!
Jeff Williams:
I did? Wow. Okay. I like it right off the bat! (laughter) And she's with Growth Abounds.
Dr. Melissa Franzen:
Growth Abounds PLLC, because the state of Illinois requires us to say that piece as well.
Jeff Williams:
Gotcha. Yeah.
Dr. Melissa Franzen:
It's A mouthful. That is my private practice that I opened in 2023. And in addition to doing individual counseling. I work with children, I work with adults but primarily focus on children.
Jeff Williams:
Children, yeah.
Dr. Melissa Franzen:
I also do parent training and consulting. I do national speaking as well. So, it's a little bit of everything.
Jeff Williams:
Okay, that's very cool. Right on. Well, where are you, physical location you have?
Dr. Melissa Franzen:
Physical office is here in Springfield on the west side. Most people know where Culver's is or where Coz's Pizza used to be. Yeah, we're right next door.
Jeff Williams:
Oh, are you right there on the West Wabash out there? Very nice. So, tell us a little bit about what you do. That's a big question right now.
Dr. Melissa Franzen:
Because I do the grief camp thing, I do the professor thing, I do the private practice, but there's a crossover in that for tenure track professors, you also have to do scholarship writing articles, presentations. And so, I'm like, how long you got? And then that abound framework I mentioned is something I've developed. The purpose of today is to talk about our grief camp that I help put on my credentials, so to speak. I am a university professor, assistant professor for a counseling master's program based out of actually Kansas.
Jeff Williams:
Okay.
Dr. Melissa Franzen:
Yeah. I work remotely, which is wonderful. And that is my full-time. I then do private practice because I feel it's so important that as clinicians, we are also practicing. Sure, And more so there's a need in this community, especially for our children. And that is kind of where my heart is in a lot of my work.
Jeff Williams:
You mentioned you started your practice in 2023.
Dr. Melissa Franzen:
Yes.
Jeff Williams:
With that, was that kind of a strange time coming out of what everybody was going Absolutely. So, kind of tell us about that process.
Dr. Melissa Franzen:
It was a big one. I've been practicing for about 20 years in different jobs, different populations.
Jeff Williams:
Mostly in the area then?
Dr. Melissa Franzen:
Yes, primarily in the Springfield area until I started teaching. I was up at Bradley and Peoria for a couple of years. And then I shifted to that remote position that allowed me to stay home. I have a son with a lot of special needs and so being present for him is a primary responsibility and desire for me. I was able to shift in that process. It then afforded me the opportunity to go ahead and jump into private practice a little bit more. As we come out of the way the world was, right? COVID and everything going on. We once saw that a lot of virtual stuff could work, which is nice. I do virtual counseling as well. However, that need for connection in person, one-on-one, let's get down to it type of connection, was missing and people were missing it. And so doing in-person work is why I am at the office for private practice. One thing I love in what I get to do is help with this grief camp and we made sure we continued. We missed one year. clearly because we couldn't do it. But we jumped right back into it because that need to support the most vulnerable populations among us is there and we didn't want it to go.
Jeff Williams:
Away. Yeah, no, exactly. Yeah, for sure. But then like a little bit more with the, like the timing of that, was it something you had kind of thought about beforehand, before 2023, 2023 feeling like the right time?
Dr. Melissa Franzen:
It was the right time for my personal life. I had actually, well, I'm in an office building primarily owned by Tracy Howland Brown, who is for Pepper Brown and Associates, another amazing, amazing counselor in this area. Her and I had actually done some of our play therapy training together back in 2009 and talked about a future where we did this. And so, life just took many different turns.
Jeff Williams:
Oh, it does, though. There's no doubt.
Dr. Melissa Franzen:
And I was working full-time, 8 to 5 type of jobs, and doing more work at home. So it wasn't until that shift to remote work, and after completing my degrees, where I could really put the time and effort into doing the private practice and be able to be present for my clients the way they needed me.
Jeff Williams:
So as far as that goes with your clients, is that like group things, one-on-one? How does that kind of work?
Dr. Melissa Franzen:
Currently the counseling side is one-on-one. Sometimes family, sometimes parents, but primarily individual. The idea of groups is an important thing and is on a like five-year plan, you know, looking at ways I can better support our community. and teachings and training I can offer. I'm working on one right now where it's working with parents.
Jeff Williams:
And this is the training, a training program.
Dr. Melissa Franzen:
Like training, yeah. I'm going to do a one-hour session for counselors on how to work and support parents with children with neurodivergent needs. And my goal is to bring that full training for both counselors as well as parents, like to our community, basing it off of an abound framework, which is something I have been creating.
Jeff Williams:
Abound.
Dr. Melissa Franzen:
Abound, A-B-O-U-N-D. So notice growth abounds. Yeah, the idea behind abounds and why that word was chosen for the business as well as this framework is it's so important for us to find a way where we can function and survive that is durable, that goes beyond just today or just tomorrow. And we saw with the shift in COVID and how the world kind of got turned upside down, we were in survival mode. And so the idea is to be able to find a way where you can meet your children, your family, your needs in a way that you are present and you can keep doing it day after day for years to come and not just find a way to survive right now.
Jeff Williams:
Exactly. It's, you can't, like you said, it's got to be sustainable. It's got to be something where it's not like some sort of a, for lack of a better term, well, let's just suck it up for right, you know, for right now to, because then that can break a person or make them feel a certain way that they shouldn't feel, so it does have to be something that is workable throughout a person's life and not just a quick, a quick sort of a thing.
Dr. Melissa Franzen:
Absolutely. Survival is survival. Survival is not thriving, right? It's getting through. And we want to, in general, I want to help my clients and our community find a way to do more than just survive. And that's part of the importance of this grief camp is that we are helping these children identify ways to not only feel safe in their grief but find a way to communicate it and live with it and grow beyond it.
Jeff Williams:
Kind of, yeah, exactly, like to understand it in a way So you may not like it, or it might not be something you might not want to face it, but you must face it. So now maybe jumping away a little bit, how did you end up fighting?
Dr. Melissa Franzen:
At that job, I had a co-worker who had previously worked there, and they had wanted to shift from remote to in-person. And so, when we started having conversations about my needs and my own durability, right? the need to not be in person as much as I loved it. The drive up there, multiple times a week, just was challenging. And so I was introduced to the school, and they happened to be hiring at that time. And God led my plan. And I am a big faith following, like in my heart, God has to guide me, even if I don't always hear him. I tell him, God smacked me in the face with it. And he did put something in front of me that let me know without a doubt I had to make a change.
Jeff Williams:
And.
Dr. Melissa Franzen:
Then this came up right at that moment. And so, I followed. And it was amazing.
Jeff Williams:
A lot of times things happen like that where, you know, it's like, you can almost feel like in a point of like, desperation or what is, what's the next step, but you can't, you can't break. You got to just keep trusting, you have to really, it is hard and it sometimes can kind of break people or does break people, but you have to be able to know, to feel that there's going to be more, it's going to be more.
Dr. Melissa Franzen:
Absolutely. And I think that's part of the reason I'm in counseling. One of the core things I teach my students is you want to help. you're wanting to serve. But what you're learning right now, you also have to trust the process. And that was a phrase I actually learned here at UIS. I won't say how many years ago. But Dr. Nancy Forth was teaching for the HDC program back then. And we had a group class where that topic came up and it was you have to trust the process. Because if you don't trust the counseling process, how can we get our clients to do it? We're asking them to not only trust us, but trust that counseling works and it does. And so trusting that the good will come, that if you do the work, you know, it doesn't have to just be faith. It's trusting in yourself.
Jeff Williams:
Right, exactly.
Dr. Melissa Franzen:
And with the counseling process and I feel like sometimes that's what we're asking these parents to do when they bring their kiddos to the camp, is trust that the work was intentionally designed to help your children and to help you as a family. We have a piece at the end of the camp where the guardians, and I call them the big people, right? I instruct our volunteers when we're talking with the kiddos, like, who's your big person? Who brought you? Who's coming back? Because we don't know who they lost. Everyone doesn't know who they lost. They know why they're there. And so we don't want to be like, what about mom and dad? If it's mom or dad that's passed. So, we ask the big people to come back at the end of the day, and we provide them an opportunity to watch a slideshow of all the things their littles have done. That day we give the kiddos a chance to present a piece that they work on. That is deeply personal for them. So sometimes they want to say it and read it. Sometimes I get to read it for them. Other times they don't want it to be read. And then after we do that, we invite everyone to come together outside, and we plant a tree every year. And we put those messages in that tree. And we plant it together, so they have a place to come back to. And the parents have a place, you know, the big people have a place to bring those kiddos back to. If they need to talk about hard things, if they want to feel close to their people.
Jeff Williams:
Yeah, I love it. I love it. Well, and the thing is too, it's, that's great that you're doing that too, because, you know, there's some places, I mean, I'm not speaking of any particular place, but it seems like more and more, you know, people can feel like things are just set up. It's this like a huge corporate entity that just pushes them through a system and people can feel that you know what I mean? They can feel when that's when it's just, okay, we're going to take some of your money and we're going to ship you to the next step or whatever like that. And it's just that's just not good for the world sometimes. And especially in situations like this, you know?
Dr. Melissa Franzen:
Absolutely. Having that disconnect and that feeling of… you say it's not good… well, it doesn't feel safe. And so, whether that's an adult or a child, if we don't feel safe, our nervous system gets completely dysregulated.
Jeff Williams:
And people can feel it.
Dr. Melissa Franzen:
And they feel it. Like our nervous systems talked before you and I ever said a word to each other. It (was) decided well before we started talking if we were safe for each other. And we want to provide that safe place for these children. And for their big people to know that it's a place where they can come and be dysregulated, but then we provide a regulated nervous system to help their systems regulate, which then allows them to be present in these activities. And they have peers where they say, hey, this person's been through the same thing. Okay, I'm not the outsider. I'm not the different person.
Jeff Williams:
I'm not the only one feeling on my own little island here or something like that.
Dr. Melissa Franzen:
Absolutely. And they're also not the identified kid who lost a loved one. Often time in classrooms when major life events change and we lose someone so important to us, you get that identifier. And it's the schools, it's the teachers, it's the community trying to be aware and compassionate and supportive. but it's still a shift in that treatment. And these kiddos can feel that. Some of them like it.
Jeff Williams:
Some of them don't. Everybody's different.
Dr. Melissa Franzen:
They just want to be themselves.
Jeff Williams:
Yeah, exactly.
Dr. Melissa Franzen:
And so, coming to the camp, it's a place where they can be just like everyone else who's lost someone.
Jeff Williams:
Love it. Well, once again, we're in the studio with Dr. Melissa Frazen. Thank you so much for coming in and talking to us about this. And once again, let people know how they can get a hold of you.
Dr. Melissa Franzen:
Absolutely. For those interested in the grief camp, you can still sign up. You can reach out to me directly at 312-890-2241 or you can e-mail me at melissafranzen07@gmail.com. You can also go to kidsgoodgriefcamp.com and that will take you to the flyer for the camp, the application for you to fill out, and then it gives you my e-mail address there to send it in to me. There's A $10 fee for each child to attend, but we do have scholarships available if they are needed. And just get that to me as soon as possible. We would love to have your littles come and be part of the stay that can help them and support them.
Jeff Williams:
Right on. Well, once again, Dr. Melissa Franzen, thank you so much for coming in.
Dr. Melissa Franzen:
Thank you very much.
Jeff Williams:
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