Photo by Nini Xiong
Mao Beckett
Healing is rooted in decolonization and liberation at Reset & Resilient Wellness. Founder Mao Beckett is an eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapist who incorporates somatic and spiritual awareness into her practice, guiding her clients into paths of radical self-care, intuition strengthening, relational healing to self and others, and divestment from colonial and perfectionist thinking. Beckett started Reset & Resilient Wellness in 2020 and has lived in Milwaukee since 2023.
The Reset & Resilient Wellness website reads, “Healing and community is sacred and revolutionary. Connectedness and collectivism is rooted in all of us. Sometimes, we just need a reminder.”
Originally from outside Boston, Beckett’s interest in healing and wellness stems from her Kru Khmer ancestry. Her father and grandfather were traditional medicine men from Cambodia who came to the U.S. in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Additionally, the show “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit” piqued Beckett’s interest in psychology.
“I love the study of behavior and the root of why someone would do what they do,” she says. “I know in my heart that there’s more to that, and that guided my trajectory.”
Preventative Care
Beckett served in the U.S. Air Force for seven years and worked in the medical field as a public health technician doing preventative care work. After getting her master’s degree in social work at Boston College, Beckett found herself disillusioned by the whitewashed, heteronormative approaches to therapy, finding them lacking cultural competence or being trauma-informed.
“Luckily I was able to connect with other therapists who were feeling this collective misalignment,” she recalls. “Around the same time, mindfulness had this huge boom in the mental health field, and I saw therapists selling certificate programs that cost thousands of dollars, but mindfulness is of the East; it’s ancestral to Buddhism, Hinduism and so many other cultures, and people were out here appropriating and commodifying this healing.”
On top of it, Beckett would frequently observe buzzwords being used in the mental health industrial complex that only served to suit a capitalist paradigm, causing people to plateau in talk therapy more easily. “Everybody’s in survival mode,” Beckett continues. “That’s what shifted me into this somatic space of reconnecting our mind, body and spirit.”
Community Care
To Beckett, liberation-centered healing is rooted in collective and community care as well as rebuilding the authentic sense of self. It is also where clients may reclaim their voices through non-pathologizing, non-judgmental and social justice-oriented praxis. “Colonization has disrupted that for hundreds of years,” she elaborates. “We are not born as blank slates or with blank nervous systems.”
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In fact, Beckett’s practice fully acknowledges intergenerational trauma at the hands of colonial and imperial oppression. She incorporates concepts such as Daniel Siegel’s Interpersonal Neurobiology and Stephen Porges’ Polyvagal Theory into her practice. Beckett cites from Polyvagal Theory, “Trauma is the chronic disruption of connection.”
To treat complex traumas, Beckett adapts these ideas into her EMDR intensive therapy. “It’s effective because it gets to things that we’re not even conscious of,” she notes. “In every memory reprocessing session, your brain connects with different networks and naturally taps into pent-up thoughts and insights, like a free association. Your brain takes you where you’ve been ready to go, so after a session, folks will feel like they just ran a marathon.”
Stress Relief
With her somatic and spiritual therapy services, Beckett adopts an integrative process for relieving stress and tension by way of techniques like mindfulness, movement and meditation. She also offers reiki and auriculotherapy (ear seeds) sessions. “New Age spirituality, well-intentioned in the beginning, became so watered-down and sterilized, which takes away the sacredness,” she affirms.
For pricing, Beckett utilizes the Green Bottle Sliding Scale in accordance with economic justice. “People have said that they feel like they can breathe again after they finish a session,” Beckett remarks about EMDR. “I experience EMDR with my somatic therapist in my own healing. You have more space for your feelings and emotions and reactions where you can better handle them. We’re not trying to get rid of them; we need our emotions to be our signals and protectors. We’re just not scared of them anymore.”
Beckett is part of local practitioner collective MKE Wellness For Palestine. She also hosts the collectivist self-care-themed “Hold Up, Wait A Minute!” podcast, which can be streamed at resetandresilientwellness.com/podcast-episodes, and she has a monthly newsletter that folks may subscribe to. Follow her on Instagram @maobeckett_resetresilient.
