Dr. Lisa Holland

Dr. Lisa Holland practices psychotherapy with adults and families. She also teaches continuing education classes and creates specialty programs to help professionals manage the unique stresses of life and practice.

Lisa served two terms on the board of directors for the Center for Cancer Treatment and Research at Palmetto Health. While at Palmetto Health, she established a medical family therapy program for patients and practitioners and two support groups; one for oncology patients and another for couples who were coping with infertility.

After the events of September 11, Lisa wrote a children’s sketchbook titled Jake’s Journey to help guide practitioners and parents in discussing complicated emotions with their children.

Dr. Holland created The Heart Spa, a seminar that helped women learn about the emotional connection to their hearts. The first Heart Spa was held with Women Heart, The National Coalition of Women With Heart Disease at City Art Gallery in Columbia and Florence, SC. The second Heart Spa was held at 701 Whaley with Palmetto Health Heart Hospital.

Personal:

Early in my career as a family therapist, I tried to learn the root of every psychological and emotional issue. I was obsessed with specialty training and completed internships in medical family therapy, systems, strategic and cognitive-behavioral theory. I connected with these specific theories because I could see them in action.

But, when the events of September 11 happened, I felt helpless, and, with all the training under my belt, I still felt unprepared to help people with what they were experiencing. I worried about how far all this pain and suffering would set us back. And then it hit me like a ton of bricks – I knew a lot about setbacks – I’d worked my way through my own setback when I was eight-years-old. I just hadn’t thought of my accident as a setback.

I was electrocuted. The shock stopped my heart, and I was revived through open-chest heart massage. I lost most of my memory. I struggled to re-learn what I’d lost while also trying to learn new information; every day, I felt lost, exhausted, and confused. Because my situation was unique, I couldn’t identify or describe what I didn’t know I didn’t know.

Years later, I finally realized that I’d experienced some form of Visual Agnosia – which loosely means loss of meaning. Learning this helped me see that making meaning and peace is part of how we heal. And as I continued to put all the pieces together, I realized that no matter what I did, I wasn’t going to recover who I was before it all happened. I realized what I had to do was to grieve the loss of who I was before it all happened and restart where I was. I did. And I still do.

Here’s a link to a Camden Chronicle article about my accident Read the article