Why I Didn’t Pursue Licensure After a Double Master’s at UPenn
If you've ever sat across from a therapist and left feeling like all you did was talk in a circle without an outcome… you’re not alone.
I was once that patient. I spent thousands of dollars on therapists appointments and felt I was looping in a hamster wheel.
If this resonates, you're not the problem.
The model just wasn't built for all of you.
I found real, transformational work in holistic methods and that’s the work I’m blessed to now share with my clients.
I graduated with two master's degrees from the University of Pennsylvania in Counseling & Mental Health. Here's something most people don't know about the training pipeline for Western therapists: holistic methods aren't in the curriculum. Not because the professors are bad. But because the incentive simply isn't there.
Think about it… you can't exactly make money off a client who has found wholeness inside of themselves.
But you can bill indefinitely for a diagnosis and a prescription.
The system was designed around a particular model: one where the goal, whether consciously or not, is management. Not liberation. Not wholeness. Not the kind of deep, embodied transformation that makes a client look back six months later and barely recognize the person they used to be.
The first thing Western therapy teaches clinicians to ask isn't "what is the client feeling, holistically?"
It's "what's the diagnosis?"
And I watched what that did to clients. The moment you hand someone a diagnosis, something shifts. It can feel like relief at first, finally, a name for the “thing”. But then it starts to function like a ceiling. Like an identity. Like a reason things will always be this way.
My clients aren't diagnoses. They are people who got so good at surviving that they forgot how to live. They don't need a box. They need a way back to themselves.
Even setting aside the diagnostic piece, there's an entire dimension of healing that traditional talk therapy simply doesn't touch.
The body. The nervous system. Desire. Pleasure. Life-force energy. The raw, electric current of your own aliveness that doesn't care how many times you've journaled about your childhood.
Here's what I learned (and what the research now backs) the body holds what the mind has already explained away. You can talk about your pain for years. You can develop extraordinary insight about where it came from, why it's there, what it means. And your body can still be bracing. Still unable to soften, receive, surrender, even when you desperately want to.
Talk therapy operates from the neck up. And real, transformational healing lives in the body.
So I left the map…
Mid-grad-school, I started a holistic mental health company. I studied yogic text, somatic work, reiki and all of the “woo-woo” things that science is now catching onto.
I built something the textbooks never taught me… a practice for the whole human.
Not just the thinking part.
The part that lives in the body. In the breath. In the parts of you that wake up when you finally feel safe enough to feel.
My Ivy League training taught me the rules. Somatic work taught me what the rules miss.
And the gap between those two things is where my clients actually heal.
I’m not here to villainize therapists.
Many do extraordinary work, and there is real value in talk-based approaches. What I'm saying is that they were trained within a system that has a limited scope.
If you've done the therapy and read the books and know your attachment style inside out and still feel like something is missing…. You haven't failed at healing. You've just been working with an incomplete toolkit.
The body is the missing piece. Always.
When your nervous system finally learns what safety feels like, everything changes. The way you carry yourself. The way you receive love. The way you relate to your own desire. The way you walk into a room. The way you lead in your career.
If you're ready to work from the inside out, I’d love to connect.
Sign up here directly for a complimentary consultation with me.
