Illustration by Eugenia Mello
If you peeked into a session with Valeria Strunk, a therapist specializing in children’s mental health, you wouldn’t see typical talk therapy. A child isn’t just sitting on a couch conversing like an adult, spilling their problems. Strunk will tell you that’s just not how kids work.
Instead, you’ll see them acting out a scene with kinetic sand and little figures. Strunk prompts the child to create a story, which can look like battle scenes, sometimes with explosions and lots of dead figures around. She sees a number of children making fences.
But this isn’t a reenactment of something they saw in a video or read in a book. She’s teaching them how to pull trauma out of their bodies, figure out what it feels like, and animate it on the outside to her and to others.
Associate owner of Wired to Bloom Therapy & Consulting in West Chester, Strunk finds herself immersed in the nation’s and the region’s immigration debates daily. She works with immigrant families and others impacted by changing policies, including family members, friends, and school classmates. “The same systems and uncertainties affecting immigrant families shape the emotional landscape of the children and communities I serve every day,” she says. “The stress is both individual and collective, and its impact shows up in our schools, our businesses, and our mental health systems.”
Strunk, 41, says the themes she’s encountering are heavily weighted toward aggression, anxiety, and grief—beyond immigrant families themselves. “Some children are losing classmates, and some are hearing that families are being separated,” she says. “These kids are watching it happen in real time.”
Photograph by Ana Corsmeier, Courtesy Wired to Bloom Therapy & Consulting
Deep trauma work in children is her passion. Behind the fences, she knows what to do next once it explodes in the sand or in their lives—because she was in their places once.
Growing up in Brazil, Strunk signed up for an au pair exchange program in her early twenties to find an American family to live with and take care of their kids. “It’s supposed to be like a bigger sister at the house and be part of the family,” she says. “They sell that so beautifully. On paper, it was amazing.”
The marketing on the American side sells a “savior” mindset, she says, “kind of like rescuing these people from Brazil.” The job is attractive to young women because it comes with the longest U.S. visa they can get, allowing au pairs to stay in the country up to two years.
“Leaving Brazil was very hard,” she says. “When I first came, I was much more connected to my family, especially my mother, my father, and some of my extended family. My father passed away 12 years ago, and more recently I made the incredibly painful decision to step back from my relationship with my mother.”
She brings her own generational trauma to her work as a therapist and focuses on breaking that cycle.
Photograph by Ana Corsmeier, Courtesy Wired to Bloom Therapy & Consulting
Strunk worked for two families when she first arrived in Cincinnati. The first, in Hyde Park, was great to her, she says, until she started saying no. There was a clear job description of what she was supposed to be doing in her role, but the scope kept creeping wider and wider.
She struggled with pushing back. “I had the language barrier,” she recalls. “I was young, with no friends or family here.”
Strunk worked 60 hours per week, not the maximum of 40 allowed. She was required to do overnights by herself, which were not permitted. After six months of being taken advantage of, she says, she put her foot down—and she was kicked out of the house in the middle of the night.
Her supervisor didn’t answer her phone calls, and Strunk had nowhere to go. The family made up a story that she left her job, and so she was almost dismissed from the au pair program. But because she had proof in the form of saved messages that the family was violating their agreement and overworking her, she was allowed a second chance with a new family. The new arrangement was slightly better, working with a single dad in Dayton, though it wasn’t the “big sister” vibe the program promised.
The program was designed to help Strunk escape Brazil, which she calls warm and accommodating but also a “cruel place” for a Black neurodivergent child like her to grow up. Instead, in her quest for a better life, she encountered a condescending perspective that “because you didn’t have anything and I’m giving you those things, you have to deal with whatever I throw at you.”
After the au pair program concluded, Strunk got married and tried out a variety of career options, including business school. She babysat for a couple with foster kids and started learning about the U.S. foster care system, which got her interested in social work. She applied for adjustment of immigration status and received a three-year green card first, then applied for a 10-year card afterwards while taking classes at Northern Kentucky University. She applied for citizenship before graduating from NKU in 2019, just before having a baby, and she developed postpartum depression as COVID shut everything down. She worked as a child welfare social worker for two years, and the first time she had to remove a child from a home, the child screamed and screamed in her car as she drove around while working out a place for them to go temporarily. She recalls as a newly nursing mom her breasts leaking as she listened to another child cry.
“Once a child is removed from a bad home situation, whatever the circumstances, there is not a lot of support for that child, for the family, or for the worker,” says Strunk. “People don’t understand it can be an act of love sometimes to give up your children because you can’t function at the time. It’s so stressful. And there is so much more to be done.”
To do “so much more” herself, Strunk realized she had to go back to school. “To make the big changes, you have to get a master’s degree or you aren’t able to accomplish much more than what you’re doing as a beginner,” she says.
She got trained in play therapy, which she says felt like “fresh air” compared to other classes and programs focused on trauma-informed therapy that addresses behaviors rather than causes of the behavior. She started learning the theory that “the language of a child is playing” and met Machen Champion, who founded Wired to Bloom. Strunk jokes that she started to “stalk” Champion online until she had a job. Today she’s a partner in the practice.
As hard as she worked to build her career, the current U.S. political environment around immigration issues seems to be working just as hard to tear it down. “As a small business owner, I am aware of how the ongoing uncertainty for immigrant families impacts my nervous system,” she says. “There are days when my body is in a state of heightened alert, and I have to intentionally ground myself so I can continue to function, co-lead my practice, and show up fully for the families we serve.”
When Strunk came to the U.S., she remembers being shocked walking down the street and having strangers randomly ask about her day. “I felt welcome and I felt safe,” she says. “It wasn’t really from the family I worked for, but from the community approaching me. People smiled and waved.”
That welcoming feeling has come to an abrupt and disturbing end, Strunk says. “I don’t feel safe leaving my house now, and I’m documented,” she says. “But the moment I open my mouth, even if I don’t give it away with my looks, you can tell I’m not from here. It’s so confusing to feel like literally at any point my life can turn upside down just because of the way I look. My daughter is mixed race, and when she’s with her father she has the protection of being with a white person. When she’s with me, that protection goes away.”
Strunk says she’s been told that she’s not Black enough to be considered Black and not good enough to be doing the job she has because English isn’t her first language. Several people have told her, “Go back to your country” and “Why are you here?” Others will pretend not to understand her accent. “It’s not even passive-aggressive anymore,” she says. “It’s, ‘I don’t want you here. You’re taking our space.’ The experience always leaves me with a feeling of being ‘less than’ and never ‘fully American.’ ”
She supports her cousin and her cousin’s child in Brazil, but she hasn’t traveled there in a number of years. “Traveling feels genuinely frightening to me right now,” says Strunk. “I am terrified of being profiled, and I will not put my daughter through unnecessary distress. Traveling to Brazil, or traveling in general, was one of my favorite ways to take care of myself and reconnect with who I am, and that’s been taken from me in a very real way. I wish I could create a space here where my culture feels more present while still honoring the doors this country opened for me, especially in my education. It’s a complicated love.”
Children in Strunk’s therapy room talk about the same struggles, whether regarding themselves or those around them. All immigrants and minorities are sharing a common experience these days. “Black kids right now are going through this stage of feeling even less welcome and less of a person,” she says. Children can feel confused if the grownups in their lives say, “These other kids are not equal to me.”
One of her client families had to move from Ohio to another state to feel safer, based on their family dynamics here, says Strunk. “They felt they could not stay and make sure that their children were living up to their full potential. They were scared to leave their house.”
Even kids who are not directly affected by the immigration debate are absorbing images from television that they don’t have the mental framework to process. “Some are talking about racial profiling and layers of racial and cultural bias,” she says. “I see that firsthand in my house, as I had to explain to my daughter who ICE is. Children grasp the weight of the current political moment, even if they can’t name it, and that results in feelings of exclusion, danger, and unpredictability.”
Mental health concerns have seen steep increases in recent years in Cincinnati and nationally. If you need to make an appointment for a child struggling with mental health issues to be seen for a professional diagnosis and you want the visit to be covered by insurance, be prepared for a long wait—sometimes even more than a year, says Strunk. She’s seen the hoops therapists have to jump through, such as small private therapy offices that sometimes spend two years getting paneled, or onboarded, with insurance. Some clients and providers are denied by Medicaid.
“There are a lot more people trying to find ways to deny coverage than people trying to find ways to make care accessible,” she says.
Therapists covered by insurance can rarely accommodate everyone on their waiting list. Meanwhile, affordable care options for a full psychological evaluation for kids are nonexistent at the moment. “That should be typical and available, and it’s not,” she says.
A year ago, Strunk herself went the private provider route to pay for her own assessment, which revealed a diagnosis of autism and ADHD. She also experienced the bureaucracy tangle as a parent while getting her daughter a diagnosis. “It’s a pretty big chunk of money,” she says. “A full psychological evaluation for something like Autism Spectrum Disorder or ADHD, without insurance, can run anywhere from $1,000 to $3,000 depending on the evaluator. That’s a significant barrier for many families.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that 20 percent of U.S. children ages 12–17 face unmet mental healthcare needs. The Data Resource Center for Child & Adolescent Health reports that more than half of all children found it difficult or impossible to access mental health care.
The U.S. healthcare system is getting even more complex, Strunk says, after Medicaid/CareSource said it will retroactively recoup Medicaid payments from some behavioral health providers in the state and reduce future reimbursements from 100 percent to 85 percent. “For many of us, that could mean potential financial catastrophe, loss of income, loss of access to marginalized clients, and bankruptcy,” she says.
Strunk says she could lose everything she and Champion have worked for, depending on how much the practice is required to pay back to Medicaid on patient claims. The Ohio chapter of the National Association of Social Workers recently launched a petition drive to push back on the government’s decision and to call for the public to contact their legislators.
Lazy. Rude. Loud. Disconnected. Stoic. Moving too much. Once Strunk received her autism and ADHD diagnosis, she finally had a reason for why these labels had been placed on her throughout her life. “This is why my brain is wired like that and why I’ve always had a connection with kids who have big, baffling behaviors,” she says. “They fascinate me. I respond to their overwhelming and unsafe stances in ways that sometimes didn’t make sense to other people.”
She is delighted to share with a child that his or her brain is “wired like that” and that he or she has amazing superpowers a lot of people don’t. When appropriate, she shares her own story directly with kids to make them feel seen.
Strunk says that real harm is being done now to our immigrant communities and the larger community as a whole. “Before, people would say we’re going to just agree to disagree, and now they’ll say, ‘Let’s wait for this difficult period to be over,’ ” she says. “At the stage we’re in right now, we can’t just wait. If you’re in a place of privilege, you need to be doing something to support the people who aren’t.”
Personal trauma can be healed through connection, safe relationships, and children feeling that they’re understood, says Strunk, especially among immigrants, diagnosed autistic kids, and anyone who isn’t a neurotypical white cis male. “Our nervous systems are working so hard to be part of a new language and new culture while we continue to be marginalized and discriminated against,” she says. “We have children growing up right now thinking their friends don’t belong because of their color or their diagnosis. Every child deserves to feel they belong somewhere.”
If nothing else, Strunk invites community members to listen to people instead of talking about them. “Listen to someone who’s recently crossed the border and had to leave their family and their culture,” she says. “You will learn so much. We are just people. We are not a threat.”
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