As a therapist struggling with chronic (yes, decades-long) depression and anxiety, I know what it’s like to wake up and feel like a failure. To wonder why things that seem easy for others feel impossible. To hypothesize about what is wrong with you. To see mistakes as failures and fear repeating them. To avoid feelings with numbing out, self -destruction, and compulsive thoughts and behaviors. To try all the things we’re told to try and find yourself falling short again. To feel like a failure because all the things that are supposed to help left you more hopeless. 

Will I ever recover from what’s happened to me and stop repeating these patterns? Maybe I shouldn’t be here. I thought this time, this day, this moment would be different, but here I am again. Am I being punished? Feeling this way can’t be normal. The nights of rumination circle around like a garish carousel. 

Being a highly sensitive person (HSP) makes us more susceptible to the impacts of trauma, and can compound the self-blame and shame of depression and trauma. If you have been told you’re too sensitive, take things personally, should just ‘let it go’ and feel hurt easily, you may be an HSP. Understanding this can help to see that there are gifts hidden within the struggle, and we can talk about how to lean into them. 

From an early age, I  knew I wanted to be a therapist. I felt deeply the importance of using the pain that lived inside of me to contribute to the healing of others. 

While I can’t promise that this treatment or that modality will fix all the problems, I’ve experienced the transformative power of unconditional love and acceptance. I’m grateful to my therapists for seeing me with love and without the judgments I impose upon myself. I’m grateful to them for seeing the light in me when I couldn’t. 

Although I come to my sessions prepared with tools and evidence-based approaches, clients I’ve helped have consistently told me that, for the first time, they felt understood, seen, and cared for in a way that stayed with them and transformed their relationships with themselves.