The mental health career of Peg Walsh, a board-certified clinical nurse specialist and psychotherapist who practices in Bonita Springs and Fort Myers, has been one of unfolding personal individuation. While Walsh’s earliest roots went deep into public health nursing, she now focuses on Gottman Method Couples Therapy and sex therapy certified by the American Association of Sexuality Educators. Her background as a visiting nurse, consultant and training expert for homecare staff has sharpened her communication skills that now serve to help couples learn the skills they need to master their current situation and reinvent their sex life in order to restore passion.  

“It’s personally meaningful to use the short-term cognitive/behavioral therapy and psychodynamic principles that I am trained in to help individuals. With couples, I use the Gottman Sound Relationship House as the paradigm for understanding long-term committed relationships. We work together on building and restoring friendship, mastering constructive conflict and identifying shared goals and meaning, as well as life dreams. Couples learn communication skills, self-esteem and boundary setting. Since nearly all of life takes place in a relationship, which requires good listening skills, I particularly enjoy helping them learn to listen to themselves, as well as each other, and to help them create the life they want,” says Walsh.

In her earlier years, Walsh’s personal search to create the life she wanted led her to embark on a three-day nature-based approach to the Journey of Soul initiation, supervised by Animas Valley Institute, in Colorado. “Being alone on a vision quest for three days in a Colorado aspen forest was both terrifying and peaceful. I used a tarp rather than a tent, and woke up to a touch of morning dew as well as songbirds hopping around. I had a supportive partner. We would let each other know we were okay by moving stones whenever we went to a nearby stream for daily water. I went in the morning and he in the evening. If the stone has not been moved, then we would know to find the other as they were in trouble,” says Walsh.

Although other questers returned with complex messages, Walsh’s was simple and profound. She heard, “Be still and know I am,” and received some symbols that in the years since the quest, have come to have more and more meaning.  

At the encouragement of Animas Institute and the suggestion of a friend, Walsh returned to the site of her quest one year later. “We were encouraged to go back in a year and spend one night. I wasn’t going to do it until a friend said, ‘You’ve got to.’ I took her with me so that she could drive me to the trailhead, drop me off and send out an alarm if I didn’t return. From there, I walked through sunshine, intense heat, insect swarms, rain and sleet. The elevation of 9,000 feet left me short of breath. I kept thinking, ‘I will just get as far as I can.’ I made it to same the site where I spent time by the stream and thought of what author Hermann Hesse used in Siddhartha to describe what the Buddha’s liberated eyes saw as he meditated by a stream. Later, I slept peacefully during the night,” recalls Walsh, who took this as a message to study meditation.

Although Walsh feels that her inner directives are subtle or unconscious, she continues to trust and follow them just as she did on her quest. “Anyone who goes on a vision quest does so not just for personal benefit, but also for community. In my work, I do a lot of listening and validating. I help clients understand that they have to ask for what they want directly, listen inwardly and trust themselves and the universe. These were all things I experienced during the vision quest, which was really a metaphor for a lifetime of studying psychology as a way of learning about life and my emotions,” advises Walsh, who also practices from the office of Steven Machlin, in Fort Myers.

Peg Walsh, 9990 Coconut Rd., Bonita Springs. Steven Machlin, M.D., 6820 Porto Fino Circle, Ste. 1, Ft. Myers. For appointments call 718-208-6986 or email [email protected].