I grew up in foster care, dropped out of high school, got my GED and worked my way into medical school. A journey that felt, at the time, like the greatest proof of something I desperately needed – that I was worthy & capable. It meant that the girl who was neglected and abandoned, judged for where and with whom she lived, could become someone with a title, a degree, and a place in the world that no one could question.
If I’m being honest, that was as much why I became a doctor as anything else. Yes, of course, I wanted to help people too. That part was true and always has been, maybe a hidden form of giving and receiving at the same time. Most of my life I craved, or better yet yearned, for the kind of stability that comes with credentials no one can take away away and solidified some sense of security. This idea, which came from society and no other place, was that this is what I needed in order to be free and “better” in some way. Being that I had no family or known associated that were doctors I was under the illusion that doctors held all the answers, doctors knew why people suffer, Who else would know?
And Then I actually got to the other side.
After graduating in late 2012 the reality hit quickly. Loans needed to be paid and in order to be considered for a residency program, I needed to take my board exams.
For those unfamiliar, a residency is a type of internship program all doctors are required to complete to be licensed or specialized and it last for an additional 3-5 years after you have already completed the eight years of education. Not to mention you pretty much are making minimum wage, something I hadn’t fully reckoned with when I signed up for the dream.
Psychiatry was the plan. But in the meantime, I needed income. So I took a job with a small 10-bed residential treatment facility. What I didn’t expect was how fast they and I would grow. That small facility opened up new locations as the model expanded into all areas of the behavioral healthcare field which included, not just substance abuse, but eating disorder and adolescent care. Within a short period they had grown to over two hundred beds with twelve treatment facilities across the country, and I alongside, became an executive leader helping them do all this.
I was overseeing, creating and partaking in the clinical operations and standards of care. I had therapists, nurses, and medical staff working below me as I gained a great deal of insight on how business in medicine was run.
By most measures, I had so called “made it” People told me so. I had more autonomy than I would of ever had as a resident or an attending, even more income. I had a seat at the “round table” for making big decisions in how someone received care or got help.
But I didn’t feel like I made it, my rose colored glasses of why I even went into medicine were gradually being shattered while I too became unwell.
I bare witness to the limitations of the system. The dictation of the Insurance companies for lengths of stay and types of care – usually determined by the cost instead of what patients truly needed. I noticed the staggering list of meditations that patients were on as they too were cycling back through the same doors months later, and still suffering. Doctors pressured to see more patients in fifteen-minute slots while simultaneously documenting everything, leaving almost no room to be present with the person in front of them.
This broke my heart, made me jaded and even resent my decision of becoming a doctor, sacrificing so much time. I was completely lost in what I even wanted in my life and felt like I was not helping anyone but just feeding a system that was broken. So even though I passed all my board exams (USMLES step 1,2,& 3) I gave up on the idea of residency or psychiatry for more reasons then I have even expressed here and I stayed in that role for about 7 years. And for most of that time I didn’t fully realize how unhappy I was, I was running on automatic. It accumulated slowly, the way things do when you are busy enough not to look directly at things.
At the same time, my thirteen-year relationship was fracturing. My sense of self felt like something I could no longer locate. My body was sending signals I didn’t know how to read, constant chest pain that had me half convinced I was having a heart attack.
I went to doctors. I tried medications. I had a therapist. But I couldn’t get to the core of why I felt so stuck, or where my life was even heading and even thinking “is this it?”
And then, in the middle of all of it, I lost her.
My longest friend. Someone who had been there since childhood, through the craziness of my youth, even foster care, who had kids herself, who had a whole life ahead of her — she died suddenly in a car accident.
And something in me went very still during that time.
In the shock and the grief that followed, I found myself asking a simple question I had never seriously asked before, If something happened to me today, would I be happy with the life I lived?
My body answered before my mind could.
NO!
That was the beginning of the real search. Not the one for credentials. The one for something else that could help me.
I had already been reading about the subconscious mind after stumbling across it in various self-help books, feeling strangely drawn to the concept without fully understanding why.
I was never taught about the subconscious mind in medical school. from what I was grasping at the time the subconscious mind appeared to be the entire inner landscape – like the hard drive of a computer holding the memories, beliefs and programs below conscious awareness.
Could this be the reason I was in so much pain? So I did what any person at the end of their known options does: I Googled.
How do I tap into the subconscious mind?
A list of hypnotherapists appeared on my screen.
My first reaction was skepticism. Stage shows. Watch swinging. Clucking like a chicken. I almost closed the tab.
But I was desperate in the way that only people who have tried everything within reach become desperate. I had nothing to lose. So I made an appointment.
Come my appointment what happened that day completely rearranged something in me. Not because it was mysterious or strange, but because it was the opposite of that. I was in an altered state in which I was focused and aware the entire time. More aware, actually, than I usually was. And in that state of deep quiet, things that had been stored in my body for years, emotions I had never been taught to acknowledge, let alone process, grief I had been carrying without knowing I was carrying it, the accumulated weight of a childhood that hadn’t been gentle — began to surface.
The chest pain wasn’t a heart attack. It was everything I had never let myself feel. Or really even know how to feel.
That was 2018, and it was life-changing for me. Everything shifted within six months, yes 6 months! Not my life on the surface, my tangible life looked the same, but my perspective and inner world completely changed, and the physical had to catch up.
I had a new sense of awareness I had never had. I had answers about my own suffering, and the only clear next step for me was to go and learn how to do this, how to become a clinical hypnotherapist – my soul needed it. I wanted to help others in THIS way.
So I dove deep into my studies. I found a state-licensed school and fell in love with a modality that felt under-appreciated and misunderstood, and to me, like the key to everything I had been searching for from the beginning.
And slowly, I began to understand what I had actually been looking for all along — not a prescription, not a diagnosis, but a way of listening to what the body had been trying to say to alleviate the suffering. It became the door to all of my deeper questions of why we feel the way we do.
I’m not here to tell you medicine is broken, although I feel the system it lives within is.
Conventional medicine has been extraordinary in acute care, in emergencies, in the face of structural crisis — it saves lives in ways that still fill me with awe.
But in the territory of chronic illness and and in terms of long term mental wellbeing something is off with it. Not just with how symptoms are not able to be fully explained, or the suffering that doesn’t fit neatly into a diagnostic code — something is missing. And the missing piece, I’ve come to believe, isn’t a new drug or a better scan.
It’s the willingness to ask deeper questions that for me medicine was not answering.
So that is why I left medicine. Now it has been over 7 years ago today since I have opened my hypnotherapy practice and I would of never imagined I would be here today. My life is simple, quiet, peaceful and I enjoy what I do.
I am still a work in progress but I have come a long way from that girl who thought the only way she could heal or help people or even feel worthy was in a white coat.
A true testament from one of my favorite quotes from hippocrates who is known at the father of medicine.
The answers are always within you, change your inner world and your outer world will change too.
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