California Says ONLY Therapists Can Help You

There's a small group of people who believe that if you're suffering, if you grew up abused or neglected, if you're carrying childhood trauma, you should only be allowed to get help from one kind of person. Somebody who went through a specific curriculum and holds a specific license.

And that if help comes from someone who isn't those things, like for example, a mentor, a teacher, a friend who's been through it before, you shouldn't get help at all. That is what the expert witness said in the hearing against me back in April.

And that was the basis on which I was forbidden by the state from talking to my clients in any kind of paid context.

Now, I think that this is not just wrong, I think it's anti-human. Because for me, therapy turned out not to be the answer. Now, I tried it, I did it for 17 years with 11 different therapists. Talking about what happened when I was a kid, talking about my feelings, my memories, my pain.

And during those years, I not only didn't get better, I got worse. I got more entrenched in the bad memories and the bad feelings. Now, meanwhile, the problems that were actually in my life right then, the ways that I was messing things up in present time, I got no help with that at all.

Now, maybe the therapists I saw were trying to make me feel safe or something, maybe not judged, and so they just went along with all my complaining and blaming other people for my problems. I know that some therapists are better than that. But, believing that other people were to blame for my

problems was definitely how I saw things at the time. And I didn't see that I had any control over those problems at all.

And here's the hard part to say. The therapists I saw worked so hard to validate me, to reassure me, to never judge me. And in some ways they were kind of bullshitting me.

Either that or they genuinely didn't have a clear enough sense of right and wrong to tell me the truth about the ways that I was behaving selfishly. I was making self-sabotaging choices and I was hurting other people.

Now, when your trauma is running high, it is very hard to tell right from wrong. And I desperately needed somebody to teach me, to show me how to act in life, to show me where the line was because I never learned that at home and I definitely didn't learn it from the people who evidently saw their job as

making sure that I never felt bad about anything, the paid unlicensed therapists I saw. Now, what saved my life was stopping therapy and meeting up with a woman friend, who had stepped in to show me a way to get emotional relief from all the what was going on in my my mind, my heart,

and using a pen and paper to get it out, to name it, to face it, to be rid of it. And she was straight with me about how I was hurting myself and other people with my trauma-driven behaviors. You know, finally someone told me. And at first I was shocked. I was angry at her actually, but I also knew on some level