I’ve been a licensed therapist since 2015. It’s hard to believe I’ve been in practice for 7 years. Some days it feels like I’ve been a therapist for much longer and in some ways I have. Yet, on other days, it feels like I’ve just started my career. When I look back to the days of being a “baby” therapist, as I was called while I worked at the hospital, I was very insecure about my skills as a therapist. There was so much I didn’t know or understand and I had so much of my own shame and mental health battles going on during the time.
School did not prepare me to be a therapist. It taught me about theories of psychology. Yes, I did need to learn those things to be a therapist, but it certainly didn’t teach me the “how”. Continuing education has not taught me to be a therapist either. It has taught me more about self-care, ethics, treatment modalities, etc. I will give credit to my EMDR training. That taught me a lot about understanding core belief systems and how they affect human behaviors and emotions.
What has taught me most about being a therapist has been my practice. My clients have taught me how to be a better therapist. Their struggles and growth and vulnerability helped me better understand what people need and why people do the things they do. Honestly, sometimes I look back on the clients I saw when I first started my private practice and feel bad about how green I was. It probably wasn’t fair to them, but they helped me realize that I had a long way to go to be a good therapist. As they grew, I grew. Some of the clients I took on early in my practice needed a more experienced therapist, for sure. I also learned I’m not everyone’s cup of tea and that’s ok. The connection between the client and therapist is so important.
As time passed, my skills as a therapist grew and I started seeing the same patterns between clients, family, friends, and myself. I found myself talking to my clients about the same things. So I started to develop my own therapy system based on a holistic approach and negative self-talk. As I dug in further with clients, shame kept popping up. Week by week. Month by month. I dialed in on trauma, shame, emotional pain, disconnection with self and others, and a lack of sense of belonging. Every single client fell under at least two of those categories if not all. It all kept leading back to the same thing.
That’s when I decided I should write a book. I thought maybe I could reach more people that way. I owe a lot of credit to Brenè Brown. Her comparison of shame and gremlins in her audiobook Power of Vulnerability really helped fuel the idea for my practice which led to Gremlins & Goats. I recommend Power of Vulnerability to all of my clients. It’s such a good “listen”. She’s able to really break down shame in an easily understandable way. I also owe a lot of credit to my EMDR training and how I was taught to understand the brain and belief systems. As I helped clients through EMDR things really started to line up for me. The patterns I was seeing became so blatantly obvious I just knew I couldn’t be wrong about the theories I was developing on mental and medical health.
So I started writing down topics and ideas that I found myself discussing with all of my clients and further developed my treatment plans for my clients. Then I took things further and began writing Gremlins & Goats. When I finished writing it I went back and doubled checked my theories from published research. It’s an interesting sensation to know something without remembering how you know it, but sure enough, the connections and understandings I had gathered over the course of my practice could be backed by research. Maybe what I learned in school had sunk in and I just didn’t realize it? Who knows.
Anyway…I published Gremlins & Goats in March 2022. Then Imposter Syndrome settled in. Who was I to think I could write and publish a self-help book? What if I was wrong? All of the thoughts…sha-ame. I kept waiting for someone to tell me I was wrong and didn’t know what I was talking about. But, as feedback came in from my clients and some other therapists it was all positive and validating. It felt so good to hear. Then, in September, Gabor Mate released his book Myth of Normal and it validated me even more. So much of what he talks about, which is completely research-based, are the same things I talk about in Gremlins & Goats and in sessions with clients. Maybe I know what I’m doing after all. Hah.
I didn’t publish Gremlins & Goats to get rich and famous. I did it because I truly think it can help people understand their own trauma and how shame plays a role in their mental and medical health. Lately, I’ve also been mulling around the idea to host workshops or continuing education to help spread the healing even further. I think sometimes the modern take on psychology has it wrong labeling people with disorders. It really all comes down to shame, love, connection, and belonging. We need to be treating the core issues and not just the symptoms. I’m not trying to lie to myself that I can change the world for the better by myself. It’s going to take a lot of people to make a big impact on the world, but that has to start somewhere. Gremlins & Goats is my contribution to this change.
