http://www.theempoweredtherapist.com/

The Empowered Therapist, 12720 Hillcrest Road, Suite 106, Dallas, TX (2025)

11/20/2025

Dear one, you are more than your trauma responses. We don’t have to ban the parts of us that work so hard to keep us safe, but we do need to invite in the rest of us.

To those of you allowing a little more of you to exist each day, I see you.

(IC: Slide 1: Healing doesn’t remove your protective instincts, it teaches you to understand them; Slide 2: Sometimes we’ll fear healing because we believe that if we’re no longer hypervigilant, we’ll become even more vulnerable; Slide 3: Here is a little secret I want to let you in on: Learning to be less vigilant will only help you live your right now life more, it won’t make you less safe; Slide 4: In fact, when we’re able to drop our pattern of hypervigilance and begin to be in the present moment, we’re better at seeing what is actually going on right in front of us; Slide 5: Your protective instincts won’t disappear when you engage in your healing work, but your healing will allow for more of you to exist; Slide 6: You deserve to live a life outside of constant survival mode. You deserve to know what safety feels like.; Slide 7: Sadly, we can’t feel into safety when we’re in chronic activation and threat response.; Slide 8: Healing allows us to thank our protective parts while allowing more of us to explore, be curious, and take up space; Slide 9: Y’all, safety happens when all of you is allowed to take up space)

11/19/2025

Your own softness will create the healing opportunities you long for.

To those of you learning to allow a little more room for yourself in your story, I see you.

(IC: Slide 1: “Not yet” is a really important statement to grab a hold of when we’re healing; Slide 2: “Not yet” allows room for hope, it suggests there is more to the story than what exists right now or what existed back then; Slide 3: And dear one, there is always more to the story; Slide 4: “Not yet” says more will come, options exist, the future will look different because I want it to; Slide 5: Complex trauma survivors can get stuck in the pain of the past, and while this makes sense, we have to create room for new experiences to occur so our pain can begin to soften; Slide 6: If we believe everything will always be as it’s always been, then that’s the way we will engage the day; Slide 7: But if we adopt a “not yet” perspective, we may be more prone to seeing opportunity when it arises; Slide 8: We lean into a “not yet” way of life anytime we act as if the story isn’t over. So rather than, “I have no friends”, try on “I don’t yet have the community I long for.” This little shift says, community is possible, and it will happen.; Slide 9: Our language matters, and the way we speak to ourselves will limit or advance our healing journey; Slide 10: This isn’t about seeing the bright side of a dark experience, this is about believing in yourself enough to make room for healing to really happen)

11/17/2025

Just some validation for those of you who need it.

It makes sense to feel connected to someone who shows you care. In fact, this is how it should have been all along.

To those of you feeling safe in therapy after a lifetime of feeling insecure, I see you.

(IC: Slide 1: I don’t know who needs to hear this, but it’s completely okay to feel attached to your therapist; Slide 2: Therapists are attachment figures, especially for those who didn’t have a safe and secure attachment figure in childhood; Slide 3: Your relationship with your therapist is important, and you’re allowed to feel profoundly impacted by this connection; Slide 4: For some of us, a therapist was the first person who saw us, believed us, and was emotionally available for us; Slide 5: Therapy is a sacred place where we allow more of ourselves to be visible, where we let our guard down, and where we experience honest vulnerability, so it makes sense that we would feel attached to the person who creates this space with us; Slie 6: Any shame you carry about feeling attached to your therapist, invite it to soften; Slide 7: Any fear you feel about the relationship with your therapist ending, remind it that you exist in the present; Slide 8: Our relationship with our therapist may change or end, and this doesn’t mean we need to fear this connection; Slide 9: Learning how to be connected to someone without the certainty of forever is a significant step in our healing and recovery)

11/14/2025

Self-care isn’t always soft, but it is always focused on you. We are so prone to existing in binaries, as if hustling and down time are our only two options. As if we can’t tend to our relationships while we’re also tending to ourselves. As if the only way to be gentle with ourselves is to give us a pass on anything that needs to be done.

Real, true, embodied self-care is far more nuanced than this. When we are learning to tend to ourselves and our needs, we need to show up for ourselves in a variety of ways. We need to get stuff done from a place of love, not a place of self-rejection. Likewise, we need to rest in ways that nurture us, not from a place of avoidance.

Self-care can and should look different depending on your right now experience. Maybe you need to work, but you can do so in your comfy clothes. Maybe you need to meal prep, but you can listen to your favorite playlist and dance around in the kitchen while you cook. Maybe you need to move your body, but you go on a walk or stretch as opposed to hitting it hard at the gym.

Healing is all about inviting in the choices that trauma took away. Self-care that allows all of you to exist will be the strategy that helps you come home to yourself.

To those of you leaning into the nuance in your healing, I see you.

11/12/2025

We heal emotional neglect by learning how to no longer neglect ourselves.

To those of you beginning to show up for yourselves in new and meaningful ways, I see you.

(IC: Slide 1: It’s often hard for people to identify what their needs are, if they were a kid who was never allowed to have any; Slide 2: As we heal, we come back to ourselves, and this process helps us better learn about our needs, wants, and desires; Slide 3: It might feel risky to have needs, especially if you were left to handle your feelings all on your own when you were young; Slide 4: And yet, understanding your own needs, and how to meet them, will absolutely strengthen your relationship with yourself; Slide 5: When you can show up for yourself in adulthood, the way no one showed up for you when you were a child, you are providing yourself with a corrective emotional experience; Slide 6: Dear one, you already possess all of your own knowing, you just have to be ready to listen)

11/11/2025

To those of you looking for nuance in your trauma healing and recovery, I see you.

(IC: Slide 1: Rather than debating the definition of trauma on social media, we should be talking about how people recover from the experiences that impact them; Slide 2: I see a lot of therapists and mental health advocates discussing trauma online, and often the conversation is centered around what is and isn’t traumatic, and personally, I think this isn’t the best place to focus; Slide 3: Listen, not everything is traumatic. And yet, we live in a world where people are profoundly and significantly impacted by environmental factors every single day; Slide 4: And the truth is, what is traumatic to one person may or may not be traumatic to another; Slide 5: I wish we could break our obsession with comparing our pain to the pain of others, because this process will always lead to some people being invalidated; Slide 6: When we focus on what is and isn’t trauma, we aren’t really attending to the individual, we aren’t allowing multiple truths to exist, and we are promoting a system of inclusion and exclusion that tends to leave people without community; Slide 7: What if your pain AND my pain can be valid?; Slide 8: What if we call it trauma and what if we don’t?; Slide 9: What if defining what we experienced is actually far less important than acknowledging that we are all people impacted by our surroundings, environment, upbringing, access to resources, relationships, etc.?; Slide 10: Maybe the conversation we need to be having is less about questioning what trauma is, and more about accepting that most of us are trying to heal from something we’ve endured)

11/10/2025

We come by our relational way of being honestly, and we do what we know until we show our body that more exists.

To those of you learning to show up differently for yourself so you can show up differently in relationship with others, I see you.

(IC: Slide 1: Plenty of us are drawn to what’s familiar rather than what’s right for us; Slide 2: When it comes to relationships, we’re prone to repeat our patterns if we’ve never considered how they may not be working for us; Slide 3: Lots of people will want to find healthy and safe connections, yet they will gravitate towards people who recapitulate the same wound over and over; Slide 4: We revisit what isn’t resolved. We return to what hasn’t been attended to.; Slide 5: Healthy and safe relationships emerge when we heal the wound that led us astray in the first place; Slide 6: Once your body can feel the difference between safe and familiar, you will no longer find the same pattern appealing, and this is what changes your taste in who you’re drawn to; Slide 7: If you feel like you keep dating the same person in every relationship you’re in, that’s a good sign that you’re the one showing up the same)

11/07/2025

Grad school prepared you to be a therapist, but not to be a business owner.

That’s why so many amazing clinicians feel stuck when it comes to private practice. It’s not that you’re “bad” at business, you were simply never taught how to run one.

That’s exactly where The Empowered Therapist Entrepreneur Collective comes in.

It’s a community designed to give you the tools, strategies, and support you never got in grad school, so you can grow a business that’s sustainable, profitable, and still rooted in the work you love.

You don’t have to figure it all out on your own.

To all the therapists learning how to show up for themselves and their business, I see you.

Ready to build your practice with confidence? Learn more about The Collective at the link in my bio.

(IC: Slide 1: Grad school taught me how to be a therapist, not how to run a business; Slide 2: Learning nothing about business in grad school prevents many therapists from knowing what is possible in this field; Slide 3: Therapists who venture into private practice often find themselves fearful of messing up; Slide 4: Therapists who leave community mental health, hospital, or academic settings to create their own business are likely figuring out everything as they go, which doesn’t lead to feeling stable or secure in this work; Slide 5: When therapists don’t feel stable or secure in their business, clients are likely to feel impacted; Slide 6: Therapists need safe environments to work in because this work is heavy all on its own; Slide 7: Many therapists who feel like they are bad at business, simply haven’t been taught how to be good at it; Slide 8: When it comes to having a sustainable career in private practice, we often need more than clinical trainings. Most private practice therapists will invest thousands of dollars in clinical trainings, which is important for supporting their clients. Meanwhile, they will invest nothing in business mentorship, which means they aren’t investing in themselves.; Slide 9: Therapist entrepreneurs need business mentorship and coaching. This is the stability therapists need to feel grounded and secure in their business.)

11/06/2025

Practice makes progress.

To those of you learning how to slow down and be in this moment, right here, right now, I see you.

(IC: Slide 1: Learning the difference between your desires and someone else’s responsibility is freeing; Slide 2: If your needs weren’t met in childhood, you may be prone to finding adult relationships that follow that same pattern; Slide 3: To the brain, this pattern sounds like: No one is able to meet my needs, I must be too much, no one will ever show up for me in the ways I need and want them to; Slide 4: And the internal experience of this pattern in adulthood may look like feeling angry or disappointed with your peers for not showing up the way you want them to; Slide 5: And while your desire for people to be available and present for you is real and valid, we can sometimes layer this desire on top of childhood wounds in a way that prohibits adult connection; Slide 6: You see, if little you who didn’t get their needs met is still being unattended to, they may get really loud when adult you is also not getting what they need and want; Slide 7: But here’s the thing: In adulthood, the person responsible for meeting your needs is YOU; Slide 8: Of course, we all deserve to be in relationship with people who desire to show up for us, but we need to be careful not to project our childhood wounds onto our adult relationships; Slide 9: Your friends and partners aren’t responsible for healing the wounds your caregivers created; Slide 10: We have to practice slowing down and asking ourselves, “How much of my right now reaction is actually about back then?”; Slide 11: We set ourselves free when we begin to recognize all of the ways we can provide ourselves with a corrective emotional experience; Slide 12: And we take the pressure off our connections with others when we allow us and them to show up exactly as we are, without the weight of the past looming over us; Slide 13: We come by our way of being honestly, and dear one, the patterns inside of you can shift and change.; Slide 14: Things don’t have to be the way they’ve always been, and that includes us.)

11/05/2025

A whole lesson for you in this post.

Dear ones, healing is possible, you just need to give yourself a chance.

To those of you beginning to see that loving yourself will always be the way home, I see you.

(IC: Slide 1: Don’t deny yourself something you need because you have a fixed narrative about what you deserve; Slide 2: Sometimes we are the very thing getting in our way; Slide 3: Said with love: Let yourself believe that you are worthy, deserving, and capable of more; Slide 4: When we allow a faulty narrative to be the lens through which we see others and ourselves, we limit what is possible; Slide 5: Ready for the nuance? Shrinking or assuming you were to blame may have been the coping strategy you needed when you were a child, but if we stay locked into our childhood coping mechanisms as we age, we aren’t likely to feel like resourced adults; Slide 6: Even more nuance? We can thank our younger selves for keeping us alive and safe, and we can adopt entirely new and more expansive coping mechanisms as we enter adulthood; Slide 7: Healing looks like allowing your adult self to be the main character; Slide 8: Believe it or not, we honor our younger selves more when we live all the way into our adult life, and take back the space that our traumatic upbringing took from us; Slide 9: Say it with me: I am ready to write a new story about who I am and what I deserve. I am allowed to take up space. I am deserving of all the things my traumatic past took from me. I am ready to heal.)

11/04/2025

There is so much nuance needed in relationships. Some of us are too quick to take the blame and some of us hold on to our stance too tightly. It’s important that we come to know who we are and what we’re about, and it’s critically important to recognize, acknowledge, and validate those we are in relationship with.

When people struggle to admit their wrongdoing or their impact on another person, this is often a function of defensiveness. In these instances, the person may be defending their perspective rather than joining the other person in a shared conversation about their dynamic.

Healthy relationships require an ebb and flow, where each person can accept responsibility for the relational dynamic. In reciprocal relationships, it’s not helpful to focus on one person being wrong and the other person being right, rather, the focus can be on each person’s experience and the dynamic you’re co-creating.

Safe relationships occur when we can set aside the defensiveness and protectiveness that rises up inside of us, and be with the other person and ourselves in our current experience. This sort of relational dynamic takes work, and while we can’t force others to show up in relationship the way we want them to, you can start by showing up this way yourself.

When we start showing up differently, things shift. Trust me on this one.

To those of you learning how to drop your defensiveness and sit with the discomfort of being wrong, I see you.

(IC: Being able to admit when you’re wrong is an underrated relational skill)

11/03/2025

Most of the time when someone creates distance between them and their caregivers, it’s after years of trying desperately to be seen by them. For those who grew up with emotional neglect, those wounds can continue to grow each and every time their caregiver minimizes the pain they experienced as a child.

I think we have to consider relationships with a lot of nuance and going no or low contact is not the right choice for everyone. And, for some people it is the exact right choice for them as they regain their sense of autonomy and self-agency.

Often, healing from emotional neglect happens when we are believed, heard, or have a corrective emotional experience where we are attuned to. If your caregiver’s response to your pain is defensiveness, it makes sense that you wouldn’t continue to seek out attunement and connection with them.

If you read this post and feel anger rising up inside of you, or if you find yourself wanting to reject this message, please view this as an invitation to consider that this is the experience many people have.

To those who have been misattuned to by the people who should have been emotionally present for you, I see you.

The Empowered Therapist

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