Thank you for sharing your story. As a white, cis-female, middle-class-raised, conventionally attractive MSW student, I found myself getting irritated as I read... which was exactly the point. Thank you for bravely sharing your pains and frustrations with the model of therapy that is too often represented by people who look and think like me. You are absolutely right that the system needs to be challenged, filtered of capitalism, white supremacy, and cis-heteronormativity, and replaced with one that truly helps instead of hurts.

I don't know how to do that. It's painful and hard to not have an answer. Something I'm learning in my internship counseling survivors of domestic violence, is that the work requires a lot of sitting with people as they sit with injustice. My heart wants to give solutions to their problems, to see them overcome. It's a reflection of my own struggles with life after domestic violence - I want so much to fix it and make it go away. Maybe, at its very root, that's why I'm in this field in the first place. Maybe if I can help someone else, I will find the help I need too.

Your story reminded me in a very real way that there are great wounds and gaps that, as much as we want to fill and heal and disappear altogether, a better, more honest approach is to name the truth, see it in its entirety... and honor the reality that there are no easy answers or quick fixes. Sometimes all we can do is be a witness. And sometimes, we need to admit that being part of someone's healing process, as much as we want that with all our hearts, may not be something we are fit to do.