Lillian Ramey, EdD, MSW

About Lillian

I’ve always been the person people talked to. Humans fascinate me: how we survive what we survive, how we make our everyday decisions, how our emotions move us. That curiosity is the thread running through everything we’ve built at Fireside.

The reason I became a therapist runs deeper than curiosity, though. When I was a young teen, my father died. No therapy was offered, and no one in my family talked about any of it. There was just a lot of silence. I carried that, and came away wanting no one else to go through something like it alone. So I built my whole career so people could have the support and the safety to work through the hard stuff without doing it by themselves, and that mission still drives me today.

I do want to clear up what therapy actually is. To me, it’s not someone handing you the answers you have been missing your whole life. It’s self-exploration: understanding yourself well enough to be in charge of how you want your life to look, whether that means changing how you act, how you feel, or how you think. It’s like going to the college of you. Fireside is my attempt to make that kind of learning reachable for more people, in more ways, than a single therapy hour ever could.

Lillian’s philosophy

Early in my career I believed therapy was mostly about what happens in your mind. The biggest shift for me was realizing the mind, the body, and the spirit are all working together to make you who you are, and you have to work with all of it if you want change that actually holds. A Hakomi training about fifteen years ago showed me how much is going on under the surface, and how much the body takes part in every reaction and every change.

That belief is also why I focused my practice on EMDR. Once I started using it and saw how quickly it could lift the weight people had been carrying, I wanted to hand that to everyone. It worked faster and more completely than talk therapy alone, and it changed what I thought was possible.

Lillian’s education and experience

With a Master’s in Social Work, I have spent more than twenty-five years living and working in the Four Corners, across both La Plata and Montezuma counties. From outpatient therapy to intensive home-based work to day treatment and supervising multiple services in community mental health, I have been a part of providing services at many levels throughout the region. Over that time I have watched the culture change, the landscape change, and the field of mental health change, and have built my practice around the people who make this region what it is. As I transitioned away from direct practice I completed my Doctorate in Organizational Change and Leadership from University of Southern California and began building a new future for my practice. I founded Fireside to bring that experience together under one roof and to lead a team that could carry it further than I could alone.