20/04/2025
A beautiful description of how therapy can help you find and love all parts of yourself 💔❤️‍🩹💗💝
by Jan-Willem van Der Heiden.
“There is a woman,
my therapist,
who has walked beside me
for years.
Not as a partner.
Not as a lover.
Not as a friend.
But as the one who said,
“I can hold all of you.”
And she meant it.
She has seen the parts of me
no one else has.
The raw, bleeding places
that came long before I had words for them.
The rage that wasn’t rage,
but grief no one taught me how to feel.
The shame I inherited
from men who never looked in the mirror
but passed their silence down like legacy.
And I brought it to her.
Not once.
But over and over again.
The days I collapsed in her presence,
not strong,
not composed,
not impressive,
just broken.
The moments I cried so hard
I couldn’t speak.
And she didn’t flinch.
She didn’t try to fix it.
She just stayed.
The moments I lied,
to her,
to myself,
because I didn’t yet know how to tell the truth
and still feel lovable.
The moments I ran,
disconnected,
projected,
judged her for seeing me too clearly.
And still, she stayed.
She has been a mirror
for every woman I couldn’t hold.
The ones I walked away from.
The ones I betrayed.
The ones who loved me
when I didn’t know how to love them back.
She became
my mother,
my exes,
my past,
my future,
the feminine wrapped in human skin,
reflecting everything I once rejected
and everything I still longed to return to.
She called me forward
with tenderness
and with fire.
She saw through every mask,
every performance,
every polished word.
And when I broke beneath the weight
of everything I’d been hiding,
she didn’t look away.
She leaned in and held me.
And somehow,
that changed everything.
Because I didn’t need advice.
I didn’t need answers.
I needed someone
to witness the storm
without trying to stop the rain.
I needed the feminine
in her most grounded form,
not seeking to soothe me into submission,
but standing steady
as I found the man beneath the mess.
And she did that.
Month after month,
year after year,
she held the line
while I unraveled and rebuilt,
forgot and remembered,
collapsed and rose.
And she reminded me,
with silence,
with softness,
with sharp clarity,
that I am still worthy
even in my undoing.
This is not just about one woman.
It’s about Woman.
The sacred, vast, mysterious force
that knows how to hold
what men have been taught to hide.
So to her,
my therapist,
my mirror,
my guide,
my challenger.
I thank you.
For being the place
I could finally bring all of me.
For showing me that being held
is not the opposite of being strong,
it is the root of it.
For letting me fall apart
so I could learn how to come home to myself
without shame.
You are the reason
I can now hold others.
You are the reason
I trust the feminine again.
You are the reason
my heart remains open
even when it hurts.
You showed me how.
And I will never forget it.”