One way or another, Lauren Fisher is sticking around Del Ray.
Fisher started her first one-year term as president of the Del Ray Business Association (DRBA) at the height of the pandemic in 2021. Since then she’s rebuilt the association’s offerings, with virtual and distance-related neighborhood events transitioning back to in-person get-togethers. Those live in-person events include monthly first Thursday neighborhood parties on Mount Vernon Avenue, bar crawls, contests, farmer’s markets, a Halloween parade and festivals that bring tens of thousands of people to the neighborhood.
Fisher is also a psychologist and co-owner of Del Ray Psych and Wellness, and says she’s seen wonders with herself and clients with ketamine therapy.
As for what’s next in Del Ray, she says that in addition to regular fall programming with festivals and parades, a pop-up holiday market with dozens of vendors will be open every weekend after Thanksgiving in the courtyard of Gustave Boulangerie & Brasserie (2213 Mount Vernon Avenue).
ALXnow: How has being DRBA president changed your life?
Fisher: The short answer is it’s enriched my life, significantly, you know, and not just being president, but being on the board. I became involved with other parts of the city, other organizations, learned from other leaders and how the city works. I’ve grown a lot. I was terrified when I started, because I was asked to step up during the pandemic. I wondered, was I capable of being a leader? I hadn’t any leadership experience other than my small business. I hadn’t run an organization or anything political. Stepping up during the pandemic was a very unique challenge, and I learned a lot. We got the Alexandria Resiliency Grant, which was $196,000. It was awarded to our business association for recovery and revitalization. That was huge, because I’d never applied for a grant. I just learned on Google.
ALXnow: Are you going to stick around another year as DRBA president?
Fisher: I am unsure. Right now I’m definitely staying on the board. My board is really great right now. Everyone’s really stepped up to take different responsibilities, and that feels more balanced, which is why I may stay on for another year. You just never know.
ALXnow: Did it help being a psychologist for these business owners to talk to?
Fisher: I think it was just about being a good human and listening to people, being there for them. So, I’ve tried to support and validate people. I think that business owners have been struggling mentally, with burnout that took a while to recover from. But now I think that people are in a much better spot.
ALXnow: What did the pandemic do to your personal business?
Fisher: Our demand is pretty high. We’ve grown from five to 12 clinicians. We’re bicoastal now, too. We have eight clinicians here in Del Ray, and four in Washington State. There’s a three-to-six month waitlist. We tend to do longer-term therapy. We’re not really in the business of Band-Aiding. We want to resolve root issues so that you don’t have recurrent patterns showing up in your life, which got us really interested in being trauma therapists.
ALXnow: What’s it take to become a trauma therapist?
Fisher: You get more training on how trauma affects the brain, how it affects the body, how to address that, how to change neural pathways and get to deeper healing. A lot of therapists just work the mind, like cognitive behavioral therapists. They’re just strictly working with thoughts, and we trauma therapists can’t just work with the mind. We have to work somatically and energetically with the body. We have to work in a very holistic way.
ALXnow: You started using ketamine with a number of your clients a couple years ago. It’s been in the news a lot because of the death of Friends actor Matthew Perry. How do you deal with the stigma that comes with such an addictive substance?
Fisher: There’s a whole bunch of misinterpretations on it, for sure… It’s been around for the infusion model for a while, but for psychotherapy, it’s only really launched in the last two to three years as a legal, FDA approved drug. That is what we’re operating in, and we went and did the training and did we also experienced ketamine training and healing for ourselves.
ALXnow: So, you had to take it?
Fisher: Yeah, it’s been life-changing for me and for our clients… We launched a program last summer. We’ve been trained for a couple years, and we’ve done about 150 sessions. There’s great research with cutting down cravings and addictions, but how do we safeguard against it? There’s a medical eval and then there’s a psych eval. You got to get through those two to be prescribed the medication. We work with at-home lozenges that are prescribed by a medical doctor, and the amount that’s prescribed, first of all, is 100-t0-200 milligrams. If people are at risk, then we send them to a medical center to get infusions. A lot of people are using substances to escape the reality and to mute pain. We just haven’t had that problem yet.
ALXnow: What kind of results are we talking about?
Fisher: We’re seeing a lot of people resolve things. We’re seeing people with markedly reduced symptoms. There’s a woman who came in who had trouble speaking with men. She had a very abusive history with both parents and struggled in advocating for her needs. She’s been through 20 years of psychoanalysis, and we were able to do some work in two to three sessions where she started to be able to, concretely walk out of this session, start telling people what she needed, from the landscaper to the man in her relationship. She couldn’t communicate, but she needed to communicate, and her boundaries weren’t good. She was always walked all over and treated poorly. To see that change in just a couple of sessions is pretty remarkable.
ALXnow: Does Del Ray need a business improvement district, or BID?
Fisher: Not at this point. So far no one has been in any kind of favor of that. It’s just not something I see in the near future.
ALXnow: Will you ever run for political office?
Fisher: The answer is no, but you never know.
