How the River Taught Me to Listen

There was a lot of baking today. Or perhaps more accurately, there was a lot of creating pieces that will eventually become something whole. Mixing dry ingredients. Preparing fillings. Letting dough rest. None of it looked like the finished product, yet every piece mattered.

It reminded me that life has unfolded much the same way.

Before I understood psychology, before I understood trauma, before I understood healing, I was simply a little girl who paid attention.

No one ever told me I was different, at least not when I was very young. But I knew.

I spent hours in my imagination. I found wonder in the enormous roots of the trees that lined the hill leading to the Shack in Derry, New Hampshire. I watched children on the playground—not just what they did, but how they treated one another. I watched adults just as closely. My grandmother making coffee in the old percolator until the glass knob on top bubbled. The familiar rhythm of her mornings at the little kidney-shaped table in her 1950s kitchen. Somehow I believed all of it mattered.

Mostly, I watched.

People often mistook my quietness for shyness. It wasn't. I was listening. I was noticing. I was trying to understand.

As I grew older, my questions grew with me.

Why are people kind?

Why are people cruel?

Why do some people seem weighed down by invisible burdens while others carry themselves so lightly?

By high school, one question had settled into my heart.

How do people heal?

When I told people I wanted to help others get better emotionally, I was often met with puzzled expressions. Today that sounds like a perfectly ordinary career path. At the time, it felt like another reminder that I was seeing the world through a different lens.

Life, however, had other lessons planned before graduate school.

I married young and became the mother of boy-girl twins. Before long, there were three children under the age of two. I worked, commuted, raised babies, and learned something about endurance that no classroom could have taught me.

One day I realized that if I could survive this season of life, perhaps graduate school wasn't nearly as intimidating as I had imagined.

So I went.

Psychology gave me language for things I had sensed my entire life. Trauma. Attachment. Anxiety. Depression. I learned assessment, treatment planning, evidence-based interventions, and countless therapeutic techniques. Later came yoga, mindfulness, somatic practices, and more trainings than I can count.

Some of those trainings were extraordinary.

Many began to sound remarkably similar.

Throughout those years, I noticed something that wouldn't leave me alone.

Some people felt better after a time.

Some didn't.

What was the difference?

Of course relationship mattered. Feeling safe mattered. Being seen mattered. I eventually realized that two of my greatest strengths had never been listed in any textbook: building genuine rapport and creating spaces where people felt safe enough to simply be themselves.

Those things changed lives.

But they still weren't the whole answer.

The question that had followed me since childhood remained.

How do people truly heal?

Then, in the summer of 2024, a sentence came into my mind so unexpectedly that I said it aloud to my husband.

"I think I should be a shaman."

He smiled without hesitation.

"Yes," he said. "You'd be a good one."

Ironically, he knew what a shaman was.

I didn't.

Looking back now, I don't know where that sentence came from. You might call it intuition. You might call it Spirit. You might simply call it a quiet knowing that surfaced after decades of listening.

Whatever name we give it, I finally trusted it.

I entered my training with curiosity rather than certainty. I practiced journeying. Soul retrieval. Energy work. Ceremony. I questioned myself constantly.

Could these practices really belong alongside psychotherapy?

Would anyone understand?

The questions themselves weren't new.

I'd been asking versions of them my entire life.

The only difference was that this time I stopped waiting for someone else to tell me whether what I was noticing was real.

And something beautiful happened.

The more I trusted the quiet knowing that had been with me since childhood, the more often I witnessed the kind of healing I had spent decades searching for.

Not because I abandoned psychology.

I didn't.

Everything I learned as a therapist still matters deeply.

But I stopped leaving part of myself outside the room.

Looking back, I don't think that little girl was different because she imagined more than other children.

I think she was learning to listen.

The roots of the trees.

My grandmother's morning rituals.

The silence between words.

The pain people carried behind their smiles.

The moments when someone softened because they finally felt seen.

It was all teaching me long before I had words for it.

That little girl spent her life paying attention.

She is still here.

She still asks questions.

She still believes healing is possible.

And now, after all these years, she has learned that the greatest answer she was searching for wasn't found in choosing between science or spirit, psychology or ceremony.

It was found in trusting the quiet voice that had been guiding her all along.

If you've reached a place where you've done the therapy, read the books, learned the coping skills, and still feel as though something essential hasn't shifted, perhaps you're asking the same question I've been asking for most of my life.

How do people truly heal?

I don't pretend to have every answer.

But I know how to pay attention.

And sometimes, healing begins there.