Meet The Therapist: My Story

When I was a graduate student preparing to become a therapist, I used to live a double life. At school, I was a model student. I wanted to portray myself as the perfect professional; someone that no one could doubt, and that my professors who called themselves "gatekeepers" to keeping unfit people out of the profession admired.

After each class, I'd return to this other version of me. The first step when I got home was to get in the house. I'd keep plastic bags in my pockets to open doors with to avoid contaminating my house with "outside" germs. I'd strip my clothes off at the door like they were a hazmat suit, and engage in a shower routine that often required double washing everything...just in case. Afterwards, I'd open my dresser drawer using the "clean" knob, and gingerly collect clothes that I'd assured were bleached. Once I was clean, I'd confine myself to my bed; the only place I felt was clean enough to relax in.

I'd been in my own therapy for three or four years at that point with little improvement. All that time that I was aceing classes and feigning mental wellness, I'd meet with my therapist every week. In one meeting I remember sobbing on her couch and talking to her about an obsession I'd developed where I'd convinced myself I had a parasite, and was going to pass it to my unknowing family members.

After a brief silence where I could see the concern in her face, she pursed her lips and said "Have you ever considered an IOP?" 

I sobbed harder. My first thought was the impossibility of that, as if my professors and classmates found out I was that messed up, they'd kick me out of the program for sure. I'd never met a therapist that didn't seem entirely functional. Even the students and professors in my graduate program had an air of sanity that I couldn't relate to. I genuinely believed that I was of an entirely different caste; unwell, unfunctional, un-human, and certainly unable to be a therapist.

Honestly, it wasn't until a few years ago that I started telling the truth about my experience with OCD. I tried to maintain that same "professional wellness" image to my own clients, but there was something that felt quite ingenuine about the way I'd encourage my client's to honor their experiences with OCD, loved them healed or unhealed, yet saw myself as too much of a monster to honor my own journey. 

There is something unique about being a therapist with lived experience in the way that the healing that takes place in the therapy space is entirely mutual. It is my clients that gave me the bravery to be honest with myself, and they were the first people to ever see me as I was with connection rather than judgement. 

Despite the way that we may have this stigma that therapists are and should be exceptionally well, there has been nothing more healing for me than bearing witness to the mutual experience of grief, fear, unknowing, growing, and trying with my clients. It is through the parallel experience of collaborating and connecting to the human beyond expectation that I have seen the greatest strides in my own progress, and that my client's have experienced their own. 

At our core, we are all human first, whether client or clinician. It is in that humanness that we find our strength. For me, "treatment" is humanity, dignity, and connection rather than a modality or performance. 

Today, it is such an honor to live in authenticity. Sharing in the wins and the loses alongside my people. I never realized that being a therapist would heal me when I believed it would annihilate me. I'm glad that what I have discovered is that this is not a job, but a way of living and honoring what it means to be a human.