Brandi Williams, founder of SoulMed Holistic Health Collaborative.
I vividly remember my first therapy session. I was a sophomore in college and was feeling the pain of traumas past. There were so many that I didn’t know what to tell the therapist when I sat down to talk.
The therapist, a middle-aged white man working in the Student Health Center at my university, asked me, “So, what’s going on?”
In true Brandi fashion, I unloaded my problems on him like an AK-47 unloads bullets.
After a long pause to process everything I’d just shared, he asked me to identify which thing I wanted to work on in therapy.
I was thinking to myself: “This man didn’t hear me. Shit is fucked up. I need to fix it all.”
Being the conformist I was then, I sifted through my pain and picked what stood out most to me at that time - healing my relationship with my father.
He told me to think about what I wanted from the relationship, and he’d see me the following week.
I did my homework assignment and returned to therapy the following week. At the end of our session, he assigned me to talk with my father about my feelings. He said if I couldn’t speak the words, write them down and send a letter.
I left that therapy session vowing never to return. This white man had no clue about this young Black woman’s pain. Write him a letter? What in the hell was that going to do to FIX my pain?
I didn’t see him again, and I abandoned therapy … until a few years later when my pain became unbearable.
Yet again, I went into the therapy session seeking a prescription to ease my pain. Again the therapist was not able to support me.
I abandoned that therapist and stopped seeking therapy until the pain got unbearable again.
Do you see the pattern?
I continued this pattern for nearly 20 years. I was going to therapy seeking a prescription to cure my pain from the therapist.
Most of these therapists were white men or women. So, in 2016, when the pain got awful again, I was intentional about getting a Black woman.
In 2016, I started going to a Black woman therapist. She was nice. We had a great relationship, and I enjoyed seeing her, but again she had no prescription for me.
I left therapy and decided I was going to help myself.
During this process, I found solace in things all around me. Sometimes watching movies, listening to music, and having general conversations would spark a fire in my soul and cause me to reflect on some of my life and explain my pain.
I started to explore the lines from movies, song lyrics, and quotes from conversations that touched me in this way.
The exploration process involved me writing down the things that touched me and me exploring - on paper or in my head - what about it resonated with me in the line, lyric, or quote. I didn’t allow myself to settle on the first answer because it usually felt too easy. I would continue to contemplate the thing until all was well with my soul.
I spent two years following this process, which I have coined getting curious; I uncovered some mighty things about myself, including:
I accepted whatever was given to me with no questions asked. This meant that whatever people offered, I accepted - even when I deserved more.
I didn’t know myself. Outside of my kids and family, I couldn’t tell you what I liked or loved.
I changed who I was to fit whatever would make me liked.
I had a deep desire to be liked by others.
I would do things I didn’t want to do to be liked.
Despite the reality in front of me, I romanticized many relationships to get the life I wanted.
I doubted myself. So many people would tell me how powerful they thought I was and applaud me for being a light in this world. I never believed it. I trusted the word of others, on who I was, over my own.
In the words of the incomparable Whitney Houston, I didn’t know my strength. I often thought I needed someone else to BEA.
I was living outside of my values. I value honesty, transparency, and authenticity. I wasn’t being honest, transparent, or authentic in my actions. I was living a lie.
I did too damn much. In my effort to be liked, I would often take on too much, take on things that I didn’t want to do or that didn’t align with my goals or values.
For most, knowing this would have been enough. For me, it was not. All was still not well with my soul. I had to get to the root cause of why this was true.
Answers to why I believed these things came slowly over time and revealed that an attachment break with a critical adult at a young age made me feel unlovable and unworthy of love. I began seeking love and acceptance wherever I could get it. I realized these things were negatively impacting my quality of life, most notably my relationships with those closest to me - and it was starting to impact me professionally. If you know me, I don’t play about my business. So, I would not let anything get between me and the bag! More than that, I wanted to start living a softer life, more aligned with my authentic self.
With this information, I restarted therapy in January 2022 with intention and purpose. I was intentional about who I wanted to work through my issues with - a Black woman.
I knew what I needed in a therapist. I needed someone who was going to help me go deep and who was going to challenge me to push through the uncomfortableness of remembering and reliving my pain so that I could get to answers. I learned that this type of therapy is called psychodynamic therapy.
Ninety days into therapy, on March 10, 2022, to be exact, I had a breakthrough.
I went into therapy that day with a new realization - that had come from curiosity about why I had lost my professional edge. Through conversation with my therapist, I realized that my desire to be liked was not only associated with my relationships with people but also directly connected to my professional ambitions. At that moment, it all clicked; I’d spent nearly 50 years trying to be worthy. I learned to excel at school and my profession when I wasn’t getting what I needed through personal relationships. The accolades from these things sustained me - until they didn’t. When I started working to uncover what was keeping me bound in my relationships, I realized that I didn’t care about professional accolades. I was doing that for everyone else - not myself.
With this knowledge, I could start working on what it would take to love myself, show up authentically, and find what I needed within and not outside.