Trauma Victim Therapist Feels Her Clients' Pain

By DAVID KELLY

March 5, 2001 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Lynn Merrill Jones specializes in what she calls blood-and-guts therapy. Crime victims, disaster victims, victims of domestic violence, badly shaken police officers and firefighters. Jones has seen them all.

The Camarillo psychotherapist has counseled survivors of the Northridge earthquake, ambulance drivers who retrieved body parts from roadsides and a woman so traumatized by a strangulation attempt that she couldn’t wear a necklace without reliving the incident.

“When you read about some disaster or crime in the county, the victims always end up here,” Jones said.

Jones, 53, is the founder of the Morbrook Institute, which runs teaching, counseling and therapy programs. She recently was honored as Mental Health Professional of the Year by the Camarillo Health Care District.

Jane Rozanski, who heads the district, calls Jones a gem. There were other contenders for the award, she said, but Jones stood out for sheer hard work and enterprise.

“She does what needs to be done,” Rozanski said.

For those she’s counseled, Jones can be both a quiet listener and a bolt of lightning, jolting them out of self-pity.

Susan, a Camarillo accountant who declined to give her last name, said her life radically changed after meeting Jones.

Crippled by polio at birth, she wasn’t able to walk until she was 12. A car wreck at age 34 crushed her legs, knees, ankles and left arm, leaving her permanently on crutches. Angry and bitter, she came to Jones for help.

“I believed everyone was staring and talking about me,” Susan said. “I never went out, except to go to work. In therapy, Lynn would get in my face and confront me and ask why I thought I was a lesser person because of my crutches. She told me I was projecting my feelings onto others. It changed my whole way of thinking.”

Jones rarely discusses her own life trauma for the same reason she empathized with Susan--she fears that others might treat her differently. An accident during her birth left Jones’ right arm paralyzed behind her back. After a series of operations, which ended when she was 13, Jones’ arm was brought around to the front, but it remains paralyzed.

The experience helped her form the compassion needed to counsel other trauma victims. Although she sees up to 63 patients a week, she says she treats each as though they were the only one.

“I know what it’s like not to fit in,” she said. “I feel I can get under the skin of people when they tell me about their loss.”

Pam Heath has known Jones since the pair attended kindergarten together in Hollywood.

“She had a new cast every year, but I never saw her as handicapped,” Heath said. “It was a nonissue. Lynn didn’t ever think she was handicapped. She’s a miraculous, wonderful person and she’s still cool.”

Jones, who was born in Los Angeles, came to Ventura County in 1976 and got a job running a YMCA children’s program. Shortly after arriving, she and her husband split up, leaving her to raise their sons, ages 2 and 4, as she tried to further her education.

“I went to 10 different universities from age 18 to 42,” she said. “I never worked less than two or three jobs at a time.”

Jones eventually earned a doctorate in clinical psychology from the Fielding Institute in Santa Barbara.

“I wanted to be the best, so I flew around the county attending seminars and going to conferences,” she said.

Jones soon thought it would be easier to bring the conferences here. But it wasn’t. At first, the best she could do was rent rooms at area hotels for small groups. Those grew to larger seminars, including one at the Red Lion Inn in Santa Barbara with 2,000 guests and 35 speakers.

“It was an enormous task,” she said. “I was subsidizing it with my private practice.”

In 1983, Jones founded the Morbrook Institute. It was her dream, a place where top psychologists could lecture and students could learn the precepts of psychotherapy.

The Camarillo office of Morbrook is a hive of activity, with 24 staffers. Therapists address all sorts of problems--anger, drugs, learning disabilities, eating disorders and trauma, and there are a host of classes for budding psychotherapists.

Jones, whose sons now are grown, four years ago married psychologist E. David Migocki, who serves as chief financial officer at Morbrook.

Jones said many of those who seek her out are referred by other clients.

The saddest cases, she said, are fathers of dead children.

“They sit out there in the waiting room in their three-piece suit and briefcase,” she said. “They come in, loosen their coat and start sobbing. Then they put their coat back on, pick up their briefcase and go back to work.”

Had she not become a therapist, Jones would have liked to be a ballroom dancer.

“Unfortunately, the woman has to always raise her right hand over her head,” she said. “Which I can’t do.”

But she still can dance, she said. She just has to improvise a bit.