I was being treated for depression and anxiety in what I thought were routine, helpful ways. But I was being harmed.
I was looking for relief. And at first I was relieved to have a diagnosis that told me what I was feeling was not my fault. My healthcare providers offered me traditional remedies in the form of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs. Did I experience the relief I was looking for? In some ways, yes, I was able to tolerate the circumstances of my life to a greater extent. But in reality there was a lot about my life that nobody should ever have to tolerate. Is tolerating the intolerable what we should be striving for?
Unfortunately, the little relief I felt was accompanied by some real harm. The SSRIs came with their own side effects, and trying to stop them precipitated a cascade of new physical, emotional, and neurological symptoms as well. But more surprising – and alarming – to me were the non-physical consequences of taking SSRIs. I experienced disorientation and a sense of disconnection from myself. I no longer felt quite like me, and in essence, I learned to mistrust my body and the messages it was trying to send me. What scares me even more is that I didn’t realize the extent of the disconnection from myself until I was no longer taking SSRIs. Even today, as I reflect back on my medicated years, I don’t know the extent to which my perceptions and responses to reality were authentically my own, or elicited by the drugs themselves.
When I look back at nearly two decades on SSRI drugs, I believed that my depression and anxiety were evidence of a problem within me, and that the way to deal with that problem was to take drugs in an attempt to manipulate and suppress how I felt, so that I could better tolerate my life. I didn’t yet understand that my depression and anxiety symptoms were really messengers brilliantly communicating to me that I needed to change my life in order to not just survive, but thrive.
This wisdom carried me through the difficulties of getting off the drugs and abandoning my self conception as a “sick person”. It was also my base of strength for what came next: contending with the deeper wounds of disempowerment and disconnection that were always at the heart of my struggles, and what had led to my diagnoses and drugging in the first place.
I believe that what we need most in order to heal and grow is already inside us.
This is the truth that underpins my life today and forms the basis for my work with clients. I would never have learned this if I had not lost faith in the medical model of mental health, tapered my prescriptions, and fought to build a new life for myself on the other side.
My mission today is to help others learn to trust their own inner wisdom: to nourish, to care, to grow, and to heal. The belief system that justifies and promotes the use of psychiatric drugs and diagnoses often leaves no space for that inner wisdom to emerge, and ironically, leaves no soil for all the richness and wonder of life to take root.
It takes time to amend the garden of the soul. There are many people willing to sell you flowers, or tell you which ones to grow. I am here to help improve the quality of your soil and maybe, down the line, do a little pruning.
My work is guided by:
- My own experiences
- The experiences of the thousands of people I have had the privilege of knowing, and working with since 2017
- The deep wisdom of the earth and its rhythms and systems
- A Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology and a Master’s Degree in Professional Counseling, with specializations in both addiction and trauma
- My former practice as a therapist in multiple settings
Today, I prefer to work entirely outside the mainstream mental health system, though I understand it deeply and often assist my clients in finding ways to better navigate it. I personally have stepped away from the use of diagnostic terms like depression and anxiety because I find that they often obscure what needs to be healed, rather than illuminating it.
Despite the significant investment I made in earning my degrees, and in obtaining additional specialized training and certification as an experiential trauma therapist, I ultimately chose to walk away from the system. I realized that my service to others needed to draw from a broader palette, and be more flexible than what the world of insurance codes, licensing bodies, and the generally disempowering hierarchical nature of the entire model could offer me and my clients.
Especially during my taper from psychiatric drugs, I felt my world shrink. Everything revolved around surviving the difficulty of my withdrawal process and all its effects on my body, mind, and spirit. But after five-and-a-half years of tapering, I was finally free… and my world expanded. Today I live in the countryside with my partner and our two cats. I am a beekeeper with a growing apiary and a honey stand next to my local community park. I am a gardener who particularly enjoys growing plants that are edible and medicinal. I love making health-supporting herbal creations with the plants in my garden for myself and my loved ones. I am a long-time jewelry maker and singer. I always feel my best when I have spent the day unplugged and outside. My life today is messy and beautiful, and I am so grateful for it all.
