Board Member Spotlight - Sonya Thomas, LCSW

Our board member spotlight this month is more of a “retrospective”. Outgoing Past Chair, Sonya Thomas, is completing her second term as a member of the NPI Board of Directors at the end of this year. Sonya first served on the board from 2014-2016 and was nominated for a leadership position a few years later, serving again on the board from 2018-2020. During her first term on the board, NPI began the multi-year process of implementing the recommendations made by the NPI Design Team. Leadership was restructured, moving from a dual chairperson position serving one year, to a single person serving a three-year term as ChairElect, Current Chair and Past Chair. Sonya was the third person in the Sonya Thomas, LCSW inaugural class of the new leadership structure and expresses bittersweet feelings at saying goodbye to serving on the board, which has been so much a part of her professional development and service over the past half-decade, plus.

Sonya came to the board feeling a degree of shyness and uncertainty, wondering what she would have to offer NPI. Along the way, she found her footing and her voice. Some of her prouder accomplishments include negotiating a rate that was in budget to secure Stan Tatkin as one of our more popular Jules Seeman Fall Workshop presenters; writing several well reviewed articles for NPI reflects, including a moving memorial to Prince, and starting the NPI Meetup group, which at its height had 180+ members. She was instrumental in co-hosting several well attended book discussions, and pulled together a slate of CE presenters that consistently drew large luncheon crowds. It was emceeing the CE luncheons that Sonya literally found her voice, doing something she never imagined herself being able to do; speaking publicly in a room full of esteemed colleagues without fainting or being loaded up on benzo’s. The opportunity to work on her fear of public speaking is something that she will forever be grateful to NPI for providing her.

Sonya is most proud of her efforts, along with Jamie Kyne and other brave colleagues, in implementing the NPI Viewpoint Diversity Project in 2018. This project was formed with the purpose of creating safe spaces to have conversations around provocative topics, with a commitment to nurturing heterodoxy. Jonathan Haidt’ s “Moral Foundations Theory” was used as a lens through which to try to understand different views on such topics as assault weapon and the 2nd amendment, the racial wealth gap, and the actual limits of viewpoint diversity. Given that our membership skews heavily progressive, Sonya and Jamie believed it would be a project worth undertaking to try to understand viewpoints quite different than those that are native to most therapist’s. She believes this remains, now more than ever, a worthwhile aspiration, given the hyperpolarization and tribalism that has become endemic in our world.

As Sonya says good-bye to serving on the board of NPI, she remains committed to the organization, and very much looks forward to the time when we can all be together again. In the meantime, she has begun shifting the focus of her volunteer work to assisting in making sure retired racing greyhounds find loving, forever homes with the Nashville chapter of Greyhound Pets of America. When not working at her private practice, helping couples create transformational change in their relationships, she can be found spending time with her wife and their two recently adopted greyhounds, Bette and Ursula. If you are ever on the Shelby Bottom Greenway or at the Riverside Village Pub, you may run into her and the fam. If so, please do say hello.