My Mental Health Journey: How Therapy Led Me On a Path to Healing

Photo: Kei Moreno

October 10 marks World Mental Health Day — so this blog post couldn’t be more timely. In addition to my spirituality, I owe my success and well-being in part to my decision to take care of my mental health and go to therapy. Through that process, I learned how to love myself and get treatment for substance abuse. This is my story.

Learning to Love Myself Before Others

The idea to go to therapy was planted long ago by a close friend when I was living in Atlanta. I’d gone over to her house to help her prepare for a party. By the time the festivities started, I was already drunk and down. She told me: “You’d have a better time drinking if you dealt with all of the things that are going on with you.”

Years later when I moved here to L.A., my destructive behavior was finally catching up to me. It’s often said that being in a relationship mirrors who you are and where you are in your life, and that couldn’t be more true for me. My unhealthy relationship — and the words of my friend years prior — made me realize for the first time that I didn’t know how to love myself. I was finally ready to go to therapy.

At the time, I was so unaware of myself — I was still drinking and using drugs. In my mind, my hard-partying was glamorous; like something you’d see in a Chloe Sevigny movie. It was how I was avoiding getting to know myself, and I was so removed from my own reality.

I also had unreasonably high expectations of myself — for better or for worse, it’s something I soaked up from the strong, supportive women who were the dominant force in my family. I was so hard on myself for such a long time, and combined with my addiction and my behaviors rooted in trauma, I didn’t realize how much I was hurting my partner.

Deciding to go to therapy on my own made the process easier and learnable. It was through a gay organization, so I felt even safer because they were sensitive to our particular needs. For the next 3 years, my therapist helped me see so many things, even when I was in the midst of addiction. She helped get me onto the path of recovery from alcoholism and drug abuse.

I finally started to understand the things I was going through: Depression, anxiety, you name it. My therapist helped me work through the effects of trauma from the need to survive growing up in the projects, being the victim of rape and molestation as a child, and being abandoned by my mother, to name a few.

How Therapy Made Me a Better Listener

I’ll be the first to admit that love people. But until I knew myself, I was what everyone wanted me to be. It’s something that also helped me be “safe” to people who might have otherwise felt threatened by my Blackness.

In understanding myself, I am now able to truly see people and hear them. As an esthetician, there’s such an intimacy about doing skincare and grooming and having people in your chair and in your space. Through my own mental health journey, I’m excited to continue helping my clients learn to love themselves — whether it’s boosting their self-esteem with a great facial or otherwise.