What Happens When the Therapist Breaks?

People come to me to be held. To find language for things they’ve never said aloud. To piece together the shattered architecture of their lives and bodies and stories. And I’ve learned how to hold them. Gently. Fiercely. Sacredly.

But what no one prepared me for—what no one tells you in the trainings or the supervision or the sacred circles of this work—is what to do when you’re the one who shatters.

When the therapist breaks.

When the floor gives out underneath you and the old trauma returns in waves, louder than ever. When you’ve worked so hard to become safe, to become stable, to become someone others can trust—and suddenly you can’t even trust yourself to get out of bed.

When the body you’ve studied, the mind you’ve healed, the soul you’ve honored—become a battlefield again.

And the cruelest part?

You still know exactly what’s happening. You’re watching yourself from the inside with full awareness. You’re still a therapist—just one bleeding out quietly while holding the scalpel.

I have lost everything. And not in a poetic, mythic kind of way. In the real, raw, terrifying kind of way.

I lost my income. I lost my sense of safety. I lost relationships I thought were my anchors. I lost the fragile belief that if I just did enough healing work, maybe life wouldn’t gut me again.

But here’s the truth that’s emerging from the rubble:

Healing doesn’t make you immune from devastation.

It just gives you a different kind of spine when the devastation comes. It gives you memory. It gives you tools. But it doesn’t give you protection from being human.

Some days, I hate that.

I want to be exempt. I want to be held in the light I offer others. I want to be spared the return of grief that tastes like blood. I want someone else to be the container, the calm, the one who whispers, “You’re not crazy. You’re just hurting.”

But this is the deeper initiation.

This is the part no one talks about when they romanticize the wounded healer. This is the cost of being someone who walks others through their darkness:

Eventually, you’ll be asked to walk through your own. Again. And again.

And still, you’re expected to show up. Still, you’re expected to hold space.

But what I’ve learned—what I’m learning in this brutal, holy unraveling—is that sometimes, the most honest, most sacred thing I can offer is not perfection, not strength, not resolution…

But presence.

To say, “Yes, I’m still a therapist. But right now I’m also a woman in ruins. And if I can hold both, maybe you can too.”

Because here’s the thing: I haven’t stopped being a healer.

I’ve just stopped pretending I’m unbreakable.

And maybe that’s the point. Maybe what we need right now isn’t more polished providers, more professionals who can cite the science while dissociating from their own story. Maybe what we need is truth—the kind that bleeds. The kind that trembles. The kind that keeps showing up anyway.

So here I am.

Not as a hero.

Not as a brand.

Not as a savior.

Just a woman who knows how to hold space, even while she’s gasping for air.

A therapist who has lost everything.

And who, somehow, is still here.

Still offering.

Still becoming.

Even in the ruins, I believe there’s something sacred being rebuilt.