For years I told the story of how I became a therapist as if I stumbled into it. I’d say, “My goal was to do something that I had a passion for, that helped others. I also knew I didn’t want to spend my life behind a desk, functioning as a cog in a wheel that built wealth for some CEO. So I simply took the next best step, and somehow, it led me here.”
In my undergraduate program I had to figure out what I wanted to do. I started as a journalism major, then moved on to athletic training, then to speech communications with a minor in psychology. I fell in love with the world of psychology and my advisor encouraged me to get my masters in psychology.
I spent two years studying the art of therapy. The principles, the theories, the law and ethics, and the cultural considerations that made up enough credits to earn my masters degree. I spent a year in an internship learning how to sit across from clients in their pain. I showed up, I studied, I met with my clinical supervisors, and learned how to listen in a way I never had before.
But in that internship I was performing. I wore the right clothes, I asked the right questions, and I mimicked and regurgitated what my supervisors had taught me. I knew how to ask questions gently and thoroughly enough to come back with a clinical diagnosis and I knew how to cross reference that diagnosis with my diagnostic manual. I wrote treatment plans and copied in steps that I’d learned about in grad school, and on paper I was a star intern. I was even asked to stay on after my internship to be a paid employee.
After that I landed a full-time paid internship where I earned the 3,000 hours I needed to sit for my licensing exams and once I passed those I went on to work for the county and other agencies for a few years while I built my private practice on the side.
For 10 years it felt like the doors just opened for me. I did the work, I showed up and I was professional and thoughtful. I began to teach couples how to communicate better as a way to heal their broken bonds.
As I continued to pursue advanced trainings and learn from master therapists it felt like I could never learn enough. In sessions with my clients I felt like something was missing. My inner knowing was telling me that I needed to go deeper, but I just didn’t know how.
In many healing spaces, it’s said that a psychedelic journey begins not with the medicine itself, but in the moment you agree to sit with the medicine. Things begin to show up in your life that the medicine is guiding and asking you to look at. But in the Mazatec culture, it is believed that our journey has been passed down through our ancestors, and that the medicine has been guiding and speaking to us all along.
When the postpartum periods of my life turned my mind into a maze, it led my broken spirit to the ancient medicines that have woven the web of my lineage together. I learned that I’m a healer through lucid dreams and powerful visions in breathwork and by spending years sitting with my own shadows and doing the painful work of generational trauma healing.
Becoming a couples therapist wasn’t something I stumbled upon. Being a healer was encoded on my soul and decided before I even stepped foot onto a college campus. I did not accidentally come to the work of infidelity recovery - the medicine called me here.
What has been coming into my awareness lately is how the wounds of betrayal have burned through my lineage. One grandmother was scorned and left to raise 5 children on her own while her husband moved on to a new life with his mistress. The other grandmother was left to explain to her children why a girl at school was claiming to be their sister.
I’ve seen how those infidelities separated the women from who they were truly meant to be, leaving them bitter, angry, and unable to love freely - passing on to their daughters the inability to trust and love. I’ve seen how patriarchy and capitalism have kept the men searching for external acceptance and validation that they’d never truly receive, and how that pushed them to seek in the arms of women, in work and achievement, and in the endless pursuit of material possessions - passing down to their sons the inability to be vulnerable.
I’ve spent years healing and breaking these cycles and I will continue to do my own work, but now when I sit across from my clients I no longer have the feeling that something is missing. Through my own healing I’ve become embodied and I’ve opened up the channels of my heart and spirit which help me see and feel others with the depth I once longed for.
The work I do is sacred and powerful, and I have the medicine and guidance from my ancestors to thank.