Regaining yourself after experiencing life-altering or traumatic experiences is exactly what trauma therapist Gladys Smith has specialized in over the last 15 years at the Webster University campus in St. Louis and locations abroad.
Smith is the assistant director of Counseling and Life Development at Webster. She is also the advocate for victims of sexual assault for the campus and Webster’s worldwide campuses.
“I do individual and group psychotherapy, assessments and consultations with other universities and consultations with faculty members and staff members,” she said. Smith serves on the Behavioral Intervention Team during a crisis and teaches as an adjunct professor in the Women and Gender Studies Dept.
“Right now I teach culture, gender and violence and I teach an addictions course,” she said.
Smith retired from 27 years of military service on September 1, after 14 years of active duty in the U.S. Navy and another 13 years in the Navy Reserve. Her work in the military – with sailors and Marines who had been through a lot – shaped her civilian career.
“I started working as a medic and I would pick up guys in the ambulance, or women, or families we picked up in the community,” Smith said. “And I worked in the ER for a really long time and what I found out – it was just a lot of underlying things, like drug and alcohol, sexual abuse and just a lot of issues like that.”
The experience prompted her to take a second job to assist others in crisis. It was Special Details, in drug and alcohol counseling. Her first two clients, a woman and a man, were both victims of sexual assault.
As the work escalated, she started learning about trauma and traumatic stress, and along the way, the impact of addiction.
“But trauma just kind of took over,” she said. “Trauma, depression, anxiety and it just interested me and there were not a lot of people interested in that during that time.”
She still follows the work on posttraumatic stress and related issues by noted researcher and clinician Bessel van der Kolk.
Smith is also a caregiver for her mother and a yoga instructor. She picked up yoga during her travels in Asia.
“I started to notice what it did for stress and what it did for stress management and then, about three or four years ago, I became an instructor through Clayton Yoga,” Smith said.
After the unrest following the 2014 Ferguson police shooting death of unarmed teenager Mike Brown, Smith used yoga to help Canfield Green residents reduce stress.
“About a year after the Michael Brown incident, I was able to do yoga down at the site for the people that were impacted right in the neighborhood,” Smith said. “It was older people, right at the memorial. It helped them relax for just one minute. And some younger people too. Anything for them to relax for a little bit, rather than be on guard. At night – ‘boom, boom, boom’ was all they heard – and yelling and screaming. For a good cause, to some degree – but disrupting their lives.”
Smith also teaches a free, weekly midday yoga class on the Webster University campus.
Smith is from University City and graduated from University City High School. In college, Smith earned a bachelor of science in Health Care Management from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale; a master’s in Health Science from Washington University St. Louis; a master’s in Education for counseling at the University of Missouri St. Louis before getting a doctorate in Psychology from California Southern University in Irvine.
She is a member of Sigma Gamma Rho, Inc.
“I love what I do. I do it with my heart. I believe if you do things from your heart, you figure out how your heart beats, your life is so much easier, regardless of circumstances,” Smith said. “You are who you are – not what happened to you.”
