Rita J. Goss, Ph.D.
About
At 73 I was just diagnosed with EDS, my 40 year old daughter has had severe symptoms since age 10 but was not diagnosed until about 5 years ago–and my 18 year old granddaughter has hypermobile type. [I have had to recently have cardiac surgery for my cardiac manifestation.] Having walked the diagnosis disaster for 40 years with my daughter, I have personally experienced all the problems that come with seeking services as an EDS family: ignorance in diagnoses, misdiagnoses, medical abuse, etc.–my daughter was not properly diagnosed until she was 25 after much misunderstanding from the medical community, and one of my own long-term providers said to me last month “it’s really terrible to finally find out at 73 that you have a disorder that you’ve had since birth!” Since my specialty is children, I certainly have worked with lots of stress issues and need for supportive adjustment to mental health/survival of abuse/medical issues all my professional life. I have a keen sense of the emotional and developmental load that medical issues place not only on the younger person, but also on the advocating family. I worked for 5 years at a Child and Family Mental Health Center [one of my subspecialties is children under 6, yeah!] I have consulted with Head Start since 1979, I have been in private practice since 1985, and I have been very active in State Executive Board leadership with 2 of my professional organizations. My doctoral dissertation was on comparing self-relaxation/hypnosis techniques to frontalis [forehead] EMG biofeedback in professional women with chronic tension headaches [we all know which one won]. Twenty-five percent of my women put in their practice time and I believed could achieve a state of deep relaxation that I think was, when I was young, probably often described as an “altered state of consciousness.” They didn’t care what we called it, but only that they could do it and manage their pain and anxiety. I am big on working with feeling awareness and expression, personal goal setting [hope is a small forward moving goal right in front of us that we think that we can reach!], and living life and loving to our fullest measure. I am a fairly evervescent therapist [I see myself a lot as a feeling/life coach] and believe in deep emotional attachment. There are 6 important goals in psychological therapy [no matter how one pursues them]: support. improving one’s self-concept, better communication with others [helps one get what one wants/needs and reciprocate], better emotional identification and sharing with self/others, internalizing one’s locus of control [feeling like control is centered in ourselves], and a more positive world view. I teach skills and give homework! I do a lot of telemedicine. I am collaboratively licensed in most states and can bill for telemedicine with most insurances, including Medicare and Medicaid. Ten years ago my daughter paused in the kitchen and said to me “mom, I know why your patients get better. ..” [why?] “because they know you love them.” Amen. PS My daughter was symptomatic from at least age 10 until she was finally diagnosed at 35–my brother, a veterinarian whose first wife had lupus, watched her symptoms and labs for years and kept saying she had an inflammatory systemic of some sort and not to back down. I did not, but that made me very unpopular at times with the medical community and at times the family. But we got through it and are on the other side–we made it through and are living our best lives! I am so excited about the ED Society and the knowledge and hope that it supports.
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