Issue #208: The 13 Most Important Lessons I Learned During my Master's in Mental Health Counseling

Becoming a better therapist and person.

📚 Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid: I have such a long “TBR” list that I rarely read every book a single author publishes, but Reid is a rare exception—and her latest is a testament to why. Like most of her novels, this one centers on a love story; this time between two astronauts recruited to NASA for their latest space missions in the ‘80s. Flash-forwards to a mission, where one of them is the capsule communicator down in Houston and the other is in a compromising situation in space (you learn this early on!), ups the intrigue and the already high-stakes. I’m also intrigued by Ruth by Kate Riley, out today!

📺 “Alien: Earth” on Hulu: This new series, from creator Noah Hawley (“Fargo”) is a prequel to the film franchise, taking place two years before in 2120. Like other near-future horror (“The Last of Us”), I’m most fascinated by the way the show imagines the future. In this iteration, a young, sociopathic trillionaire has devised a way to transfer dying children’s brains into synthetic adult bodies. Of course (?) they’re the ones to head into a crashed spaceship that may hold alien lifeforms. TBD on how long the intrigue outweighs my fear of watching horror.

🥕 Probiotic Miso Ginger Carrot Soup: Never have I ever eaten so many carrots, which have taken off in my garden (the comments here are packed with your recipe recommendations!). This week, a highlight was this incredibly simple, miso-packed ginger soup by

Liz Moody

. So easy and so good!

P.S. Culpability by Bruce Holsinger is our book club book—giving us a bit more time with this one, and will announce our date soon!

On my final day of graduate school, I began to walk towards my car after class when I suddenly turned and found myself heading down the grass slope at the edge of campus. As soon as I reached its edge, I kicked off my sandals and continued toward an expanse of shade beneath a maple tree, only realizing after I had dropped my heavy bag and settled down that the last time I had rested in that exact spot was on my first visit to campus. Back then, in the spring of 2021, mask advisories still papered the entrances. My husband and I had stayed outside, but still kept ours readily looped around our forearms in a habit formed over the previous year. My world, but also the world outside, was completely different. I hadn’t yet given notice at the lifestyle blog I worked for, and both my novel and Morning Person were unpublished side projects. The future felt like an enormous question mark, and I wondered what my coursework would look like, how I would pay for it, who my classmates would be. I don’t remember wondering how the program would change me, but, as we all know by now, it shaped my life in ways I couldn’t have anticipated.

My last day of school

I rested my palms behind me against the grass, closing my eyes as a wave of emotions crested in my chest then washed over me. I felt the divorce from my husband, the power of sitting with clients, the depth of friendships I’ve made, but mostly an almost overwhelming sense of gratitude to myself, for getting myself through the most challenging few years of my life. I am an entirely different person than I was when I began my Master’s in Professional Counseling with a Specialization in Addictions four years ago.

Beyond the nascent skills of being a therapist, my master’s taught me how to be a human being, and how to draw upon that well to show up for others. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reflecting a lot on those lessons and have collected a few stand-outs below. There’s no sugar-coating—just a real deal list of the most valuable lessons I learned during the last four years of grad school:

1. Don’t believe everything you think. For a lot of this program, I was dealing with such incredible loss (my marriage and my entire sense of self began to unravel a few months in) that I constantly confronted feelings of failure and hopelessness and a certainty that things would never be okay again. It took me getting beyond the immediate narrative that I had of things—that I had failed in my marriage and life. I eventually learned to explore the deeper anxieties and emotions that were propping those beliefs up, to be able to change my relationship to them and find their inconsistencies.