My Journey

It sounds cheesy, but I’ve always been that friend people go to when they need a shoulder to cry on. In high school, I would spend afternoons and evenings with friends talking about romantic troubles, conflict between friends, difficulties at school, and family problems.

The serious stuff seemed to only come out late at night.

I stayed up until the early hours of the morning countless times as friends disclosed dealing with depression, eating disorders, drug use, sexual assault, self-harm, or suicidal thoughts.

My life was consumed by other peoples’ issues. I unconsciously sought out and nurtured relationships where I was the emotional caretaker. It felt good to be needed, to feel like I was helping other people.

I got so invested in their lives I felt like I had no room left for my life.

It wasn’t healthy.

I couldn’t set boundaries – like needing to go to bed at a decent hour, or just spending my evenings doing something enjoyable, rather than tending to everyone else’s emotional emergencies.

I enjoyed helping people, but I also felt exhausted from tending to other people’s needs all the time.

When I went to college, many friendships slowly faded as we were geographically apart. Thus, I was able to reduce the amount of emotional caretaking I did in my new relationships. It was still there, and I still had a hard time setting boundaries – but it didn’t feel like my life was consumed anymore, which was a huge relief.

When I became active in my college’s theater department, I had no idea that the acting exercises and scenes I engaged in set a foundation of skills I would eventually use as a therapist. How to feel comfortable having a level of intimacy with new people as we did scenes together. How to be aware of how body language, word choice, facial expression, and tone of voice shape interactions between people.

During college I didn’t think I could be a therapist.

Because therapists had to go to grad school, and I didn’t think I could handle it. I was the first person in my family to go to college and getting a bachelor’s degree was already a pretty big deal for me. My family was working class, and I had to navigate the landscape of scholarships, grants, and student loans on my own.

I had been told that having a college degree was the key to a better life. Just get the degree and the rest will follow. I knew I wanted to do something where I worked with people and helped them, but it was an amorphous idea for most of my time at college.

As graduation with my Bachelor’s Degree in Sociology neared, I started having to think about real jobs and a career path for myself.

I realized that the only career that really fit me was being a therapist.

And if that meant going to grad school, then I had better start applying.

I was so thankful when I was accepted to my first choice, Cal State Fullerton. It was one of only seven programs in California to be CACREP accredited in Clinical Mental Health at the time, the gold standard for counseling programs. It’s a fantastic program that I highly recommend.

Over the course of the program and my practicum placement at The LGBT Center, OC I had a realization. All my life up until that point I had been helping others without setting any boundaries for myself. I let myself get taken advantage of. But that’s not how being a therapist works at all.

To be a therapist I had to set healthy boundaries.

It supports healthy relationships between therapist and client. It models healthy behaviors to clients. And it prevents burnout – which would eventually keep me from helping anyone effectively.

To help me with this I went to my own therapy. I found that I couldn’t set boundaries because I was intensely conflict averse. And I avoided conflict at all costs because I wanted to be liked by everyone all the time. Which, by the way, isn’t just an unhealthy aspiration, it’s impossible to achieve.

It is impossible to overstate how doing my own therapy helped me become a better therapist.

It also wasn’t too shabby for the rest of my life, too. By unpacking my core belief of ‘being liked by everyone all the time = I’m a good person’ I was slowly able to change my thoughts and actions.

My first priority in therapy with my clients is still to help you feel heard, understood, and respected.

But now if a client is initiating conflict in session, I can handle it. I don’t take it personally. And that lets me keep my therapist brain turned on instead of being overwhelmed by my people-pleaser brain.

Before I felt like I was always working so hard. That if I was just nice enough, did enough favors, or stayed up enough nights, then others would like me. But that puts my sense of worth in their control. I could do everything ‘right’ and still get rejected by them – and then feel horrible about myself.

With my own therapy, I was building the core belief that ‘I am an innately good person’ regardless if other people are happy with me that day. It’s really nice.

I earned my master’s degree in Counseling, and now I’m a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist.