"The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are."

- Carl Yung.

 

Most of what I've learned about how to help others heal has come from my own healing rather than any education I've received. While I have a master's degree in Marriage and Family Therapy and was a practicing therapist for 10 years, in an act of what I call moral idealism I gave up my therapy license because I disagreed with the foundational underpinnings of the profession. I don't believe that you need an educational degree to help yourself (or others for that matter as long as the required skill is the degree to which one has healed themselves rather than book knowledge), I believe that it is a fundamental human right to learn how to heal yourself. That isn't to say that education isn't important, but rather that the profession of therapy is limiting the ability to heal to those who have the means of expensive education to join a legally backed union that restricts the very healing it claims to propagate. I have met completely untrained (lacking a higher education degree) healers who are far more effective than trained therapists simply because they have put in the work to heal themselves.

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Here are my reasons for voluntarily renouncing my professional licensure due to my position that healing is a human right:

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1. The ability to practice therapy is restricted by state lines. Each state has its own criteria for what a therapist needs to do in order to practice in the state, which are typically arbitrary courses that do not determine a practitioner's ability to help others. The ability to help someone heal does not change with geographic location or with a couple of educational courses and a person should be able to seek out help from whoever they'd like without restrictions. The fact that healing is geographically restricted is enough for me to know that the highest value of the profession is not actually healing others.

2. The criteria for helping others heal is book knowledge and building core communication skills. While this information is extremely helpful and useful, it does not give a person the right to heal another person. I wouldn't trust a person who has read all they can on carving ice sculptures with a chain saw if they haven't carved ice sculptures before and I sincerely doubt you would either. Healed people heal people and hurt people hurt people. I've heard all kinds of horror stories of therapists (and have seen it first hand as well) that do far more harm than good to the clients they see, something I've even seen in myself when knowledge without application was my banner (do what I say but not as I do). The true ability to help others heal is equivalent to the degree to which a person has healed themself.

3. Hierarchy versus heterarchy. Hierarchy creates arbitrary barriers between who is allowed to do a thing versus not while heterarchy seeks to eliminate those barriers and puts all people at equal footing. Right now in our society the knowledge of mental health is constricted to either independent study or a master's degree. That structure doesn't exactly promote people's health as its #1 priority. Mental health knowledge needs to be disseminated at a much greater level than confining it to esoteric  and high-level learning made financially inaccessible by a hierarchical structure. Healing isn't rocket science, it's human nature and everyone should at the very least know how to heal themselves.​ Furthermore, I prefer to consider myself on the same level as anyone I see (just a person) rather than leaning on my educational status to prop up inequality and a shallow ego.

4. The profession is more concerned with job security than helping people become self sufficient. I teach all of my clients how to do any and all of the healing techniques I use and help them become proficient in them. When I specialized in EMDR I taught all of my clients how to do it themselves, essentially working myself out of a job. As a result I've had only a handful of clients come back in the four years I've been in private practice. I've never heard of another EMDR therapist who has taught their clients how to use it themselves. That simple but powerful statement yet again speaks volumes about the underlying goals of the profession as a whole; heal people somewhat but also keep them dependent. My goal is not to create dependence, it is to create independence.

5. The profession prefers to stick to ineffective methods of healing. Talk therapy is one of the most ineffective types of therapy there is and yet nearly all therapists continue to be talk therapists and graduate schools continue to focus on talk therapy as the primary methodology of healing. Why stick with something that clearly isn't very effective? Why not seek out things that are more effective? It's a choice that I find simultaneously disconcerting and telling.

6. The therapy profession restricts allowed methods of healing to whatever fits the current paradigm of healing. There are many methods of healing that fit outside of the profession's paradigm, a recent example being psilocybin's growing literature on its positive impact on mental health. I have personally experienced profound healing experiences outside of Western medicine's ideological framework and what is currently accepted as legitimate. What works should always be prioritized, not tossed aside just because of untested prejudices.

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I believe that true happiness is possible for everyone and that healing can be accomplished more easily than you might imagine. No one can do your healing for you, but I can help you learn how to do it yourself. I genuinely want you to live a life you are completely happy with and believe that it's possible, no matter what you are personally dealing with. And I commit to doing everything in my power to help you get there.