For the Ones Who Chose the Arena: An Uncensored Welcome to the Therapy Revolution
My love letter to every counseling grad student and neophyte therapist
I don’t know about you but I chose the field of counseling for layered reasons:
Because I first fell in love with holistic wellness - I studied fitness and nutrition and was originally a biology major before walking into an entry level psych course that was waaaaay more fun to me as a puzzle - and at the time, I thought the perfect add on to helping humans find their optimal set points across mind, body, and spirit.
Because I needed to understand the neuroscience of my charismatic evangelical upbringing including whether or not religious trances were real and why good people could fall for dogma that contradicts their own experience (and science).
Because I genuinely wanted to help others heal from the trauma that often came from just trying to be themselves and learn how to connect with others in a way that was deeply satisfying so that, as Hunter S. Thompson would say, they’d arrive at death “thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming ‘Wow! What a Ride!’"
Because I believed I could provide a valuable bridge between spirituality in all its varied forms, glory to horror and everything in between, and applied science for my favorite topics like death, meaning and purpose, and all things sex.
… cue the record scratch.
Let me tell you what they're not teaching you in Ethics 101 or Abnormal Psychology: You didn't choose a profession. You chose a calling that will remake you from the inside out, that will demand every ounce of your authenticity in service of someone else's liberation. You signed up to be a midwife for souls being born into their own truth.
It’s glorious, fulfilling, messy, and heartbreaking all rolled into one.
And the world desperately needs you to understand the magnitude of what you're stepping into.
The Beautiful Burden No One Warns You About
You're about to enter a profession that will ask you to metabolize the full spectrum of human experience—genocide survivors and narcissistic abuse, childhood sexual trauma and existential despair—then drive home through rush hour traffic, pick up groceries, and ask your partner about their day as if you didn't just spend eight hours holding space for humanity's darkest chapters.
You'll learn to carry secrets that would break most people. Stories that will follow you into dreams, that will make you hold your own children a little tighter, that will shift your entire understanding of what humans are capable of surviving. And then you'll be expected to show up at dinner parties making small talk about Netflix shows while your nervous system still hums with the aftermath of witnessing someone's raw courage in facing their deepest wounds.
Meanwhile, the very institutions training you will systematically strip away your intuitive gifts in favor of manualized treatments. They'll teach you to fear your own instincts, to question every authentic impulse, to hide behind clinical jargon instead of speaking human to human. You may even graduate feeling like an imposter in your own calling, convinced that everyone else got some secret manual you missed.
The Projection Minefield
And then there are the clients who will see you as their savior, their enemy, their absent parent, their disappointing lover. Who will project decades of unresolved rage onto your compassionate attempts to help. Who will test every boundary you set, question every intervention you offer, and sometimes leave you wondering if you're actually helping or just providing an expensive place for people to practice their dysfunction.
Some will idealize you beyond recognition, then inevitably crash into disappointment when they discover you're human. Others will challenge your competence from session one, demanding credentials for wounds you've never claimed to heal. A few will become so dependent on your validation that you'll feel like you're slowly drowning in their need while they accuse you of not caring enough.
And of course there’s the phenomenon no one prepares us for, what I call “death by therapist,” where, whether they realize it consciously or not, they’re using you as the bad guy to end their relationship. Those days suck ass. No two ways about it.
Welcome to the most beautiful mindfuck of your professional life.
Here's what I wish someone had whispered to me during my first year of practice:
The Sacred Disruption You're Actually Training For
While your professors drone on about theoretical orientations and treatment modalities, I want to tell you what therapy really is: organized rebellion against every system designed to keep humans small, compliant, and emotionally domesticated.
Every session you'll ever conduct is an act of revolution. Not the kind with picket signs and manifestos, but the quiet, relentless insurrection that happens when you create a space where someone can finally tell the truth about their existence. Where they can admit that their marriage feels like a beautiful prison. Where they can confess that success tastes like sawdust when you're living someone else's dreams. Where they can rage against the god who let their brother die, or grieve the mother who never learned how to love without conditions.
Forget the helper archetype they're drilling into you. It’s not enough. You're actually apprenticing as alchemists who transform the lead of human suffering into the gold of authentic living.
The insurance companies will try to reduce your work to symptom reduction and measurable outcomes. The managed care overlords will demand you cure depression in eight sessions or less. The medical model will seduce you into believing that pathology lives in people rather than in the systems that traumatize them.
Don't you dare let them diminish what you're capable of.
I escaped a lot of that by going directly into a cash pay only private practice, but if you can’t or don’t want to, you’re going to need an even stronger support system. Regardless, I’m here to encourage you to keep the ear muffs on to the nay sayers and well intended compliance pushers. Just because their nervous system can’t handle holding the line in a bolder way, doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t!
The Erotic Intimacy of Real Healing
Here's what Freud understood and modern therapy has forgotten: therapeutic transformation is an intensely erotic process. Not sexual... erotic. Life force meeting life force. The raw electricity that crackles between two people when one finally stops performing and the other refuses to look away.
As a former professor and now outspoken cheerleader on the sidelines to those who reach out for support, I've watched graduate students stumble through their first sessions, all technique and terror, then slowly discover something wild: the moment they stopped performing therapy and allowed themselves to just be a knowledgable human in the room with expertise in their chosen interests, everything changed. Turns out, presence beats protocol every damn time.
Your professors will teach you about boundaries as if they're electric fences designed to keep you safe from your clients' humanity. But the real boundary work happens when you learn to stay open-hearted while remaining unentangled. When you can receive someone's story without making it about you. When you can witness their transformation without taking credit for it.
This kind of presence terrifies people. It threatens every relationship built on “professionalism” and pretense. It challenges the cultural agreement that we should all stay politely separated by our acceptable facades.
But it also creates miracles. Daily.
The Industry That's Losing Its Soul (And Why You're the Antidote)
The field you're entering is having an identity crisis. Therapy has become so sanitized, so risk-averse, so obsessed with liability and documentation that we're producing technicians instead of healers. Insurance-driven treatment plans instead of transformational journeys. Symptom managers instead of soul surgeons.
Meanwhile, people are starving for authentic connection and paying life coaches, spiritual advisors, and Instagram gurus for what they should be getting from us. They're seeking healing from anyone willing to go into the depths with them because too many therapists have been trained to stay in the shallows. And quite frankly, I don’t blame them one bit.
It’s also why I moved into adding coaching and courses and more. Quite frankly, and in my very biased opinion, therapists, if they allow themselves to check their limiting beliefs, make AMAZING coaches. After all, we’re highly trained and have way more experience than a basic Udemy course or time fire walking with Tony Robbins.
The profession NEEDS you to remember WHY you chose this path. Because something in you recognized that this work was sacred. And before anyone starts with the martyr complex bullshit that plagues our field: sacred work deserves sacred pay. You didn't accumulate a mortgage-sized education debt to take a vow of poverty. Transforming lives is priceless, which is exactly why it shouldn't come cheap (and our managed care system needs a total fucking overhaul to make it accessible for all but that’s a soap box for another day and in the meantime, things like sliding scale or partnering with non-profits can be great advocacy).
The Courage to Trust Your Instincts in a Field That Rewards Compliance
They'll try to convince you that inexperience means incompetence. That you should defer to supervisors who've been practicing the same ineffective techniques for decades. That innovation is dangerous and tradition is safety.
But here's what fifteen years in this field has taught me: your intuition about what someone needs is often more accurate than any assessment tool. Your willingness to be authentic in the room creates more healing than perfect technique. Your capacity to sit with uncertainty serves clients better than false confidence in outdated models.
The most powerful therapists I know aren't the ones who follow protocols... they're the ones who learned to trust the wisdom that emerges in sacred spaces between two people committed to truth.
Yes, you'll make mistakes. You'll say the wrong thing, misread situations, feel helpless in the face of someone's pain. You'll question whether you're cut out for this work, whether you're helping or harming, whether you have any business guiding others when your own life feels like controlled chaos.
Good. That humility, that willingness to not-know, that comfort with uncertainty—that's your apprenticeship in emotional badassery. Because the moment you can handle a client's projection without defending yourself, the moment you can weather criticism without crumbling, the moment you stop needing everyone to approve of your methods—that's when you transform from therapist to healing force. Your capacity to stay grounded while others spiral becomes the corrective emotional experience they've been unconsciously seeking their entire lives.
And if not? Sometimes the most ethical and loving thing to do is offer them referrals to see someone else or log off the internet for a while and bask in the company of people who DO get you. (Shout out to the fellow bold clinicians who have held space for me at times over the years so I could cry or rage when I needed to. So healing!)
The Revolutionary Act of Being Fully Yourself
The most subversive thing you can do as a therapist is show up as your complete, unedited self. Not your professional persona or your carefully constructed therapeutic identity, but the raw, complex, contradictory human being who chose this work because your own journey through suffering taught you something about transformation.
Your wounds are not liabilities to be hidden behind professional demeanor. They're your credentials. Your scars are not evidence of your brokenness... they're proof of your capacity to heal. Your ongoing struggles with anxiety, depression, relationship issues, family trauma... these don't disqualify you from helping others. They qualify you.
Studies have consistently shown we humans learn best from someone we can relate to. As I like to tell my coaching clients, let your mess become your message. Not in some nauseating, crying on the internet, performative vulnerability to show “authenticity” bullshit (… because that actually repels $$ by the way… you can have pity or profits but not both), but so others can sense that you understand their experience not just intellectually but viscerally. Who recognize that you've walked through your own fire and emerged not unscathed, but luminous, and can now show them how to do the same.
Your Invitation to the Arena
So here you are, future revolutionaries, standing at the threshold of work that will demand everything and give back even more. You're about to step into an arena where human souls wage war against the forces that keep them small, where authentic living is both the weapon and the prize.
The world needs therapists who refuse to pathologize the human condition. Who understand that depression often signals a life misaligned with values. That anxiety frequently indicates a system pushing against authenticity. That relationship conflicts usually reveal two people who've forgotten how to see each other clearly.
The world needs therapists who can sit with rage without trying to manage it into something more palatable. Who can witness grief without rushing toward acceptance. Who can honor the sacred madness that sometimes precedes breakthrough.
The world needs you to remember that therapy is not a medical procedure but a mystical encounter. Not a treatment but a transformation. Not a service but a sacrament.
Trust your instincts. Question everything you're taught. Stay curious about what emerges in the space between you and your clients. Remember that your authenticity is your most powerful intervention.
And never, ever let anyone convince you that this work is anything less than sacred rebellion against every force that keeps humans from knowing their own magnificence.
Welcome to the arena, my loves. The revolution needs you.
With fierce faith in your calling,
A fellow warrior in the temple of transformation