When I decided to become a therapist, I truly had no idea what I was getting into. Fresh out of a toxic dance company and newly in Los Angeles, I knew I needed to do something different, but wasn’t sure what. After serving with AmeriCorps in the Bay Area for about 3 years, I knew I loved community work. I’ve always loved getting to work with people, seeing and being part of their lives, but more importantly, getting to hold space for their stories and experiences. And through my time with AmeriCorps, I learned that I was good at it. As an AmeriCorps volunteer, I developed what felt like my natural gifts. Listening, building trust and safety and supporting people through hard moments in their lives. I learned I loved the criers. Whenever students came in crying, I felt so comfortable being with them and helping to soothe their emotions. I worked under an MFT, (shout out to Judy!!) and learned what it meant to be an extremely hardworking and caring clinician who prepared me in more ways that I realized to be a therapist.
Now, I was living in LA, working with AmeriCorps and working the front desk of a Stretchlab, discussing whether to rejoin the LA branch of the toxic dance company I had been on previously with my coworker. She mentioned she was a somatic movement therapist and thought that that might be something I could consider doing. As she described her work, I became intrigued. I’d never heard of somatics but with my love for dance and passion for working with people, it seemed like a natural fit. When I expressed my interest, she was super encouraging. She also advised that if I wanted to get paid, I should get an actual therapist license. Thus, my journey into researching graduate school programs began. I applied for school at Antioch University in Santa Barbara, got accepted and was then on my way (via zoom).
At that point, I had NEVER actually gone to therapy. My advice for anyone who wants to become a therapist would be:
1. Go to therapy BEFORE going to school to become a therapist (your ability to read people might be some kind of trauma response)
2. Don’t go to grad school during a pandemic.
Sometimes, you can only learn the lessons by going through them.
In the first day of orientation, as we went over the guidelines and requirements, I remember hearing, “You must obtain 20 hours of personal therapy in order to graduate.”
Panic washed over me. As I sat in my chair, seeing the 40 members of my cohort’s faces in tiny zoom boxes, I felt overwhelmed and wanted to run. Had I heard that correctly? I was supposed to do therapy?? But I was here to become a therapist?? At the time, it made no sense to me, but looking back at that moment from here, I can see exactly why we needed to and I am truly grateful I did.
The journey to starting therapy was slow. I did not even begin researching therapists until at least my seventh week of the first quarter. By the second quarter, we started our dyads (practicing therapy skills with a classmate as if we were therapist and client) and that’s when full panic mode set in. I cried almost every session with my partner (Thank God for Danielle!!) and explained the fears I had about starting therapy. With such grace and skill far beyond that of a second quarter therapist, she showed up week to week and reflected my fears, asked me questions about these fears and validated my emotions. Throughout the quarter, I slowly started to talk about other challenging experiences in my life. The wild dance company I’d been a part of, moving to SoCal, relationship ponderings and by the end, I was even brushing on the impact that my father’s death had on me.
I can remember in second grade having this conscious thought that if I told people about my problems, they wouldn’t feel comfortable telling me what was happening with them. From that moment, I held my emotions on my own. Up to that point in my life, I never let anyone know how I was feeling or what I was thinking. I did not let people into my own emotional world and this thought was reinforced over and over. People tended not to ask me how I was doing after sharing their depths and struggles, and if they did, I brushed it off. I didn’t want them to feel like they couldn’t rely on me. On the outside, I was always so bubbly, excitable and friendly and while I knew I always had people who cared about me, I never allowed them in. I sat often sat alone in my sadness.
Until that point, I really only felt there was one person who truly knew every part of me and my feelings of my life (shout out to Bruno, my then best friend, now partner). Starting therapy had given me a whole new perspective and showed me how lonely I’d actually been up until that point. It also shed light on how afraid of vulnerability I was and how protective of my emotions I was (and sometimes still am). And so, sitting in grad school with my dyad partner, I began to unlearn the idea that I had to hold everything on my own, and began my search for my licensed therapist.
I started therapy with one woman, but honestly, she was terrible. She was not super attuned or attentive and was definitely on her phone during sessions. I knew I needed more, so I left. Then, I found Kevin, an incredible somatic therapist whose calmness was almost comical next to my extremely energetic and frantic self. In the first session, I BAWLED. I lost it, all of my fears, anxieties, sadness, anger, pain. I had done so well all of my life keeping everything together (or so I thought) but something about having all of the attention and energy on me, all of the space to process my things was so much to handle. I think I had a breakdown in every session for the first 3 months. I was understanding the ways I’d handled stressful events of my childhood, teenagehood and adulthood. I was facing traumas from the dance company I’d been a part of and my father’s death. I was uncovering feelings about my parent’s divorce and other family dynamics that I’d never allowed myself to feel. I was processing the idea that I felt I needed to be perfect to be able to hold everyone else’s stuff. I was unlearning and relearning who I was, what I wanted and who I wanted to be.
Being a somatic therapist, Kevin would often ask me to associate my emotions with images and sensations in my body. I still remember how clearly the first image was. A tangled necklace chain, balled up in my chest. In the image that came to me the knot was so tight, and it felt impossible to undo. It felt like every emotion was coming at me at once and there was no way to undo it all. As I had always done, and still tend to do, I wanted to deal with everything at once, but it was too much. I had to learn to slow down. Even the idea of slowing down threw me into a fit. What do you mean slow down!? That’s when I feel EVERYTHING and I did not want to feel everything! I just want it to be OVER. Through my life, without realizing, I had learned that the busier I kept myself, the less I’d have to feel. Slowing down was horrible. It meant spending hours crying, usually by myself and not understanding why. So, instead of investigating, I packed my schedule tight, leaving no room to feel.
Once I built the ability to slow down, (over a few sessions and lots of coaxing from Kevin) another image came into my mind. Indra’s net. For those who are unfamiliar, Indra’s Net is a Buddhist principle that is represented by an infinite net. At each intersection of the net, there is a multifaceted jewel. If you focus on one jewel, you can see all of the others reflected in it, and if you focus on all of the other jewels, you can see the one reflected in them. It is a representation of the interconnectedness of the universe. As I learned to slow down, I realized that that is what all of my emotions felt like. Interconnected like a web with a dew drop at each intersection. If I felt one, I felt them all and if I paid attention to them all, I could see the through line of the one. Feeling my feelings was so overwhelming, but once I understood that it was overwhelming because I was literally feeling everything at once, I could change it.
My mind was being blown by this process. At the same time, I was living through a pandemic and trying to navigate other aspects of my life. Though I started to move more slowly, everything around me and about me was changing rapidly.
I started to align my reality with how I felt inside. I began to let go of relationships and ties to parts of myself I had so heavily identified with just to survive all of these years. I began understanding what I wanted and who I wanted to become and took action to gain those things. When I think back to that time, I can feel my thoughts begin to spiral and my stomach drop a bit because there was so much change that happened so fast, all the while I felt like I was coming back to myself. It felt like a hurricane all around me while I sat in the smallest eye in the center. Everything about that time changed me and showed me that our unlearning and learning is an on going process. My current partner Bruno always says this quote, “Pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding”. I think I must have broken at least 50 shells during that time.
Recently, I attended a movie club night with my good friend Naum, an incredibly motivated and talented filmmaker. We were watching The Prince of Egypt and he posed a question, “If remembering is tied to liberation, what role does forgetting play?” In my case, forgetting was survival. Forgetting was my nervous system doing its best to protect me from what it couldn’t yet process. It was my brain tucking things away because it wasn’t safe to feel them yet. Forgetting the pain of grief, loss, and confusion. Forgetting helped me get to a place where it was safe to remember. Thankfully, I did not have to remember all at once. But remembering allowed me to understand things that had previously been so unclear. Remembering allowed my body to relax. Remembering allowed me to refind myself and my voice. Remembering allowed me to learn how to help others do the same.
Forgetting protected me. Remembering set me free.
As a therapist, I am passionate about helping others do just that. Set themselves free. By slowing down, allowing bodies to feel unprocessed and unfamiliar emotions and gain the strength to stay with those sensations, even when they are messy, overwhelming or completely new. Freedom isn’t always this big event. Sometimes, it’s subtle. It’s the first deep breath you’ve taken in days. It’s choosing rest instead of pushing through. It’s choosing to slow down. It’s choosing period. It’s crying and not apologizing for it. It was realizing that I am an imperfect human that is okay.
Becoming a therapist helped me become a human. For so long I felt I needed to be this emotionless, happy, listening ear. But thanks to this incredible journey, I feel more like myself than ever and I am so excited to help people find the same freedom.
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