Meet Cay Schubert

Cay smiles, leaning against a tree in a striped shirt.

As well as being one of the worst things that can happen to a human being, mental illness can also be one of the richest learning and humanizing experiences life offers…

There are great insights to be gained, but remember that they won’t do you or anyone else much good unless you recover.

-The Eden Express

I was a patient of psychotherapy long before I became a therapist.

I spent years being misdiagnosed with all sorts of things and trying out all sorts of treatment approaches, but I only got to the root of my problems and finally started rapidly creating a life worth living after I was diagnosed with Complex PTSD and started treating it with intensive IFS therapy.

I spent years suffering unnecessarily because I allowed the facts that "my childhood wasn't that bad" and "other people had it worse than me", to keep me away from the kinds of therapy that actually work, and I am always overjoyed when I can help a client skip past all that and get to the good part, where they uncover the gifts hidden in their suffering and start sharing those gifts with the world.

This world needs you to be so much more yourself, not less. You’ve arrived right on time, we’ve all been waiting for you.

Let’s get to work.

It was similarly transformational to finally accept myself as queer and neurodivergent (AuDHD), after devoting my early adulthood to denying those identities at all costs. Both personally and professionally, I have thoroughly investigated all the state-of-the-art methods for making people ‘normal’, teaching them to ‘fit in’ or ‘cope’, and ‘curing’ them of anything that makes them inconvenient to the authority figures in their lives. None of them work, and thank goodness.

I have never been more productive and successful than when I fully embrace and cultivate my neurodivergence, and I have found that Brene Brown is absolutely correct when she writes, "The greatest barrier to belonging is 'fitting in'"

Reach Out

I graduated from Princeton University.

Research has shown that those kinds of academic credentials are not meaningful predictors of the quality of service a therapist will provide. I mention it here to indicate that I have personal experience with the anxieties and identity struggles experienced by people in our culture who were ‘gifted’ from a young age and went through the decades-long pressure cooker that produces elite performance in children and young adults.

So if you still feel impostor syndrome in the C-Suite, if you are haunted by the fear of not achieving your potential, if life feels like nothing but a series of high-stakes performances or competitions, I get it, and it is in fact possible to embrace joy and freedom without losing your edge

More from Cay

Read Cay’s writing, stories, and articles.