About

Meg (she/they), Licensed Master Social Worker (LMSW) - Clinical

I am an attachment-focused, trauma sensitive, developmentally informed, and Internal Family Systems (IFS) trained mental health therapist. I have facilitated nature-based, expressive arts, experiential and animal-assisted therapeutic services for over a decade. I am committed to creating relationally secure, inclusive, and embodied reparative experiences for children, adolescents, adults, and care-givers. I help guide and lead with warmth, relational attunement, partnership, creativity, reciprocity, empathy, and openly welcome all parts of one’s individual experience, multiplicity of being, identities and relational landscapes inside and out.

My greatest teachers have been foremost, my children, animals, and doing my own reflective therapeutic work. I am a mama of elementary age twins, a bonus mama of a daughter now grown adult, a partner, a caregiver of many fur-wool-feather beings large and small, and land steward. I am an intuitive, empath, artist and spiritual naturalist, and I identify as a neuroexpansive, queer, pansexual, antiracist, white, racialized person and adult surthriver of childhood trauma.

My areas of interest, training and experience include: complex, chronic and intergenerational trauma, postpartum and parenting, caregiver/child relationships, early childhood development, attachment, issues related to sexual trauma, neglect, abuse and incest, autism+ neurodivergence, addiction, oppression, shame and guilt, gender and sexual identity, LGBTQIA+, depression, anxiety, boundary development and differentiation, grief and loss, self worth, body worth, somatic healing and embodied resilience.

Highlights of my experience and story

I was born and raised in Traverse City, Michigan, on Anishinaabe land known as Northern Michigan to settler colonial people. Introduced to the healing relationships of animals, nature and landscapes from birth onwards, I grew up on a small farm with my parents who established their own local business located in an old farmhouse turned veterinary practice. 

Starting out my professional career as a trained dancer and choreographer, I was called towards arts activism and social justice work. I am a Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP) Associate Alumna, through which I facilitated theater and creative writing workshops in Detroit, MI prisons and inner city high schools. Pursuing a career as an interdisciplinary teaching artist, I relocated to Seattle, WA, where I produced and directed large scale movement theater installations, and completed international artist residencies in both Mexico and Guatemala.

My relationships with animals, experiences in nature as well as work in the arts and with children attending an after school program in Guatemala, fuelled my path towards attending University of Minnesota’s School of Social Work graduate programs. I achieved my Master of Education with a focus in Youth Development Leadership, along with a Graduate Minor in Integrative Therapies and Healing Practices focused in Animal-Assisted Services. I proceeded to achieve my Master of Social Work with a focus in Clinical Mental Health and Children and Families, as well as complete DC:0-5 training through the state of Minnesota to inform age-appropriate approaches for the assessment of infants, toddlers, and preschool children.

Currently, I am engaged in ongoing Internal Family Systems (IFS) training intensives, invested in my own IFS reflective supervision, as well as completing an Interdisciplinary Certificate in Trauma Studies through the University of Minnesota. I am licensed in the states of Michigan as a Licensed Master Social Worker (LMSW, Clinical), and Minnesota as a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker (LICSW).

I have been working with children, adolescents, adults, families, caregivers, and educators in day treatment, intermediate school districts, elementary school and university settings for over a decade, since 2013.

Care-O-Van

Care-O-Van is an inclusive, place-based mental health service that provides integrative and adaptive therapeutic support to children, adolescents, adults, and care-givers. 

Located on the grounds of the secluded and family owned, 4 acre AVEC Farm, Care-O-Van specializes in offering purposeful interactions with animals, plants and landscapes with the integration of nature, expressive arts, play, culinary, and movement based therapies.

Housed within a renovated school bus, Care-O-Van is an innovative therapeutic space; a school bus turned into a play, art and experiential therapy office! Step on in, and children and adults alike experience a therapeutic setting informed to cultivate wonder, curiosity, creativity, warmth, and relational safety.

Care-O-Van’s services are purposefully facilitated, paced, and individualized in a therapeutic environment unlike any other. Shaped to each individual’s earnestness for exploration, Care-O-Van’s services are uniquely adapted to offer individually preferred modes of engagement, expression and methods of processing, and designed to create an embodied experience of both interpersonal and intrapersonal safety and connectivity.

Originally created as a mobile mental health service platform, to partner with schools, farms, parks, and local service organizations to enhance accessibility to services, Care-O-Van currently remains stationary and parked to provide services and meet the needs of our community on the grounds and in partnership with the animals of the AVEC Farm.

AVEC Care Farm

AVEC Farm, is a private 4 acre Care Farm located in Traverse City, MI, at the base of the Leelanau Peninsula, and within the residential area of the Cherry Bend neighborhood. AVEC Farm is the home to a small herd of 5 llamas, individually named Sheepdog, Fish, Sisu, Pepito, and Chewbacca, as well as a small flock of chickens named Marge, Myrtle, Laya, Elsa, and Pepa, as well as a rabbit named Bruno. Family owned, AVEC Farm is located in the proximity of Meg Mertaugh-Graber’s home residence, where she lives with her 2-legged as well as 4-legged family members. 

In addition, AVEC Farm is the home-base for, and primary farm partner of Care-O-Van, PLLC. At AVEC Farm, Care-O-Van, PLLC, provides animal-assisted services, in addition to several experiential therapeutic methods. The animal-assisted services provided, include working with the AVEC Farm llamas chickens, and rabbit as co-facilitators of and partners within the therapeutic experience. Due to this inclusion, Care-O-Van’s services are unique and look very different from a more traditional therapeutic service.