Cay’s Journey to Becoming a Therapist

I first became a therapy client at age 21 because it was mandated by my college, Princeton University, as a condition of them allowing me to reenroll. 

I had just suddenly failed all of my classes in Fall Semester of my senior year because I disappeared and simply didn’t show up to my finals.

An unbelievably incompetent psychiatrist dismissed the event as a “garden variety nervous breakdown” (real quote), though in retrospect it was just the first time I had a dissociative episode that I wasn’t able to cover up or compensate for by working extraordinarily hard and achieving the socially sanctioned markers of success (high GPA, varsity athletics, admission to Ivy League universities, etc) that tend to get people labelled as “eccentric” rather than “in distress.” 

I took the pills they gave me, accepted the diagnosis of bipolar disorder, told the therapist what I was supposed to, and graduated the next year.

I majored in psychology because it seemed relatively easy and I was trying to keep my stress low so as to avoid another ‘mental breakdown’. 

I took my first job in mental health at around age 25, after my original career plan of being a personal trainer didn’t work out. My first job was working for a nonprofit: The Harris Center, formerly MHMRA of Harris County, providing in-home ‘psychosocial skills training’ for low-income uninsured people. I ended up getting fairly good at it, so after a few years I went to the University of Houston to get my Master of Social Work degree and become a therapist. 

I worked as a therapist for various non-profits for a few years, and then for a for–profit company providing telehealth psychotherapy during the pandemic.

In retrospect, I and all my coworkers were egregiously overworked and underpaid at that company. The unbelievably high caseloads and the nature of the work (during the pandemic, pretty much everyone was dealing with the imminent death of their loved ones, so essentially all therapy was traumatic grief therapy of one sort or another) led to complete burnout, but it also gave me an enormous amount of practice and opportunities to hone a lot of therapeutic skills by serving so many people in such severe distress in such a short period of time.

It was during this time period that I started getting specialized training in trauma therapy.

This was largely because the events around that time (the pandemic itself, Black Lives Matter, Me Too, essentially every policy decision of the Trump administration, etc) were both causing new trauma to all of my clients, and also often triggering and bringing to the surface a lot of their preexisting childhood trauma. After I got my independent licensure, and after discovering that my coworkers were uninterested in unionizing, I left and created my practice.