The Messy, Human Reason I Became a Therapist
This Site Is Brought to You by Grief
Welp. There it is. (Not whoop…welp.) Besides aging myself with that opener, I figured I’d start by sharing the real genesis of this site.
After a pretty intense session with my own therapist… one of those “Oh… okay… we’re going there today” kinds of sessions. I realized I needed to do something with all that energy. Historically, when I’ve been in survival mode, I could rage-lift like a motherf—well, you get it. But this time felt different. The pain came with emotional regulation, something foreign to my younger self.
I know grief. I know depression. And when the two hold hands, it can feel absolutely devastating.
Working in crisis counseling, I often had to ask, “Have you had thoughts of suicide?” But the follow-up question was usually the one that opened the real door:
“Do you genuinely want to die, or do you just not want to live like this anymore?”
Most people answered, “I don’t want to die. I just can’t keep feeling this way.”
And I understood that. I had spent years drinking, smoking, crying, yelling, eating my feelings; trying any coping skill that could temporarily numb the pain, even if it made things worse later. Compartmentalization was my superpower… and my downfall.
At some point, people started telling me to “just get over it already,” which, surprisingly, helped in its own backwards way. I got stubborn. I pushed through. I told the pain it wasn’t welcome right now. I tried therapy, but that therapist treated me more like a colleague than a client. I tried medication and felt numb (probably dissociation, but that’s another story). Eventually, I did the one thing I knew how to do when I didn’t know what else to do:
I went back to school.
I became a counselor because I wanted to understand myself, not to have all the answers, but to learn how to feel, process, and not completely shut down. And maybe, if I could learn that, I could help someone else learn it too.
Life happened in the meantime…building a photography business, closing a long chapter, leaving my hometown, working in psychiatric care, joining a group practice, shifting to working from home, facing a loss that carried pain and regret… oh, and did I mention meeting the man I now get to call my husband? Life was … dare I say … lifeing
But recently, I got some news that delivered one of those cliché-but-real “Aha” moments.
Someone asked me, “What’s your why? Why do you do this work?”
And my honest answer was this:
Because I live this life.
Because I know what it’s like to be told to “pray about it” when that’s not what you need.
Because I know what it’s like to rely on distractions: substances, busyness, anything … to avoid feeling.
Because I know the fear of waiting for the other shoe to drop while still cleaning the house because my grandmother’s voice pops in saying, “You’ll feel better after it.”
I became a therapist not to fix people, not to be the wise sage on the mountaintop, but to use what life and training have taught me—to sit beside you, help you make sense of things, and remind you that grief, anger, and sadness don’t make you broken.
They make you human.
And they deserve to be felt.
