Member Spotlight: Dr. Jennifer Plumb Vilardaga

Name:  Jennifer Plumb Vilardaga, PhD

License #: 5044

Bio:  Jennifer Plumb Vilardaga, PhD is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Chapel Hill, licensed to practice in North Carolina, Massachusetts and all PsyPact states. She recently began her private practice, after serving as faculty at Duke University School of Medicine conducting clinical trials research, providing clinical services, and supervising psychology learners. Prior to coming to North Carolina, she completed her training and worked as a clinician-educator at the VA Puget Sound Healthcare system in Seattle, WA. She primarily practices using an Acceptance and Commitment Therapy approach and incorporates mindfulness-based practices into her work. She enjoys working with adults and older adults. 

1. What attracted you to the field of psychology? “I always was fascinated by people’s stories. What they experienced throughout their lives, what made them choose the things they choose, why they think the way that they do, etc. I’ve always been interested in that. I like to know what’s going on for someone under the surface; that’s always been fun for me. So, when I was thinking about degree I wanted, I really wanted to think about where I can be in a place where I can really understand someone’s story and maybe support them along their journey, over a stumbling block, and so on.” 
   
    
2. What do you enjoy most about your work? “As a clinical psychologist I mostly do psychotherapy, I really get to do the thing I enjoy most. I have done other things like research and academia, yet I really appreciate that part of what I do. To meet people and to understand them in their context. I’m constantly amazed by the resilience that humans experience. There is something about hearing what people experience and how they get through it, even though I know my job is to help people find new ways to cope with hard things. I’m always amazed at how people survive; what are the ways that people get by, because everyone I meet with is a survivor in some way. Everything from small stressors to lifelong ones. I love getting to be with people in their hard moments and get see all the hard work they do to be a human on this planet and reflect that back to them and appreciate who they really are.”
   
    
3. What advice would you give someone who is considering getting a degree in psychology? “I felt very fortunate early on to get to know what it might be like to work in all the kinds of fields of psychology that I thought would be interesting to me. Anything related to mental health.  I really enjoyed getting to know people who worked in those fields, even if it was just a quick coffee, or a conversation. It was just good to get to know what life might be like if I were in their shoes. That helped me figure out what type of degree I wanted to pursue whether it was social work, a PhD, PsyD, whether it was clinical or something else. I also felt like my undergraduate experience was good because it provided a nice opportunity through the faculty that I was meeting to see how many different ways that you can be a psychologist. You could be in schools, you could be in forensics, you can be a therapist, a researcher; you can be a researcher in a number of ways. I appreciated having all of that available to me so I could really think about what that would look like with respect to degree, school, and so on, and then really feeling out for myself what part of the psychology spectrum was most interesting to me. So, I encourage people to ask themselves that. For example, I found faculty members who are really interested in understanding, describing, and predicting certain ways of being. It was interesting research to me, but I always knew that I didn’t just want to predict who was going to have a problem. I want to be able to get in there and do something about it. I want to be part of the solution. So that was an answer for me that I definitely wanted a more clinical and applied direction. So, giving myself the space to do that I appreciated and recommend that other people do that as well.”
   
    
4. When you are not working, what do you enjoy doing? “I love hiking in the woods and yoga. I love singing and being with my family.”
   
    
5. What is something about you (a fun fact) that not many people know? “One of my first real jobs was in a dental practice. It was one of my favorite jobs ever. It was really fun. I got to do all kinds of things. Everything from reception work, filing, insurance, sometimes being an extra set of hands in the room to help with a patient. It was a small-town dental practice and very different from what I do now.”
   
    
6. If were not a psychologist, what would you do? “I would probably be a traveler and a writer. I would love to travel the world and write books.” 
   
    
7. What is the next place on your travel bucket list? “Lima, Peru. It's a place my family would really like to go. There’s so much history there. I think it would be really cool.”
   
    
8. What are you currently reading or listening to? “The podcast ‘This is Love’ by Phoebe Judge. She’s local to Durham and also does the podcast ‘Criminal’. I just get so much joy from listening to it.” 
   
    
9. What is your favorite word and why? “‘And’. That's such a therapist's answer. The reason why is because so much of the work I do in therapy is helping people see that the world can hold multiple truths. It's really empowering to recognize that you can have a feeling or a set of experiences and seemingly have a contradictory other set of feelings or experiences, and that others can have a different contradictory set of feelings and experiences or expectations. Nobody has to be wrong. We have to figure out how to live in that world but that's the work of growth.” 
   
    
10. What is your least favorite word and why? “’Don’t’. In part because of myself and other people I know that once somebody says the word ‘don't’ to me, I want to know why? ‘Why can't I do that?’, ‘Why is that not a good idea?’. ‘What would be bad about that?’. I always want to understand why if someone says something is not a good idea. Under what circumstances, in what context? Is it just now, is it all the time? It's oftentimes not sufficient of an answer for me to help me understand the world and why, we should or should not do something, or what would be helpful or not. When someone simply replies ‘don't’, it also doesn't give me an alternative as to what would be helpful. Or what I could hope for instead.”