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| With my husband Ron and our beloved Shira |
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| Photo by Molly |
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| Photo by Molly |
It has now been many years since I filed a complaint against Stephen Beck with the Oregon Board of Clinical Social Workers. It was my belief during the seven years that Stephen Beck was my therapist that he violated these Laws and Rules:
Dual Relationships
Sexual Involvement
Misrepresentation
Incompetence
Breach of Confidentiality
Unprofessional Conduct
Although the Board did not take away Mr. Beck's license to practice, they did take disciplinary actions. He was fined $4,000, required to acquire additional educational credits and training, would remain under clinical supervision for three years, and the disciplinary action would be made public. Given that this was before the Me-Too era, I have wondered since then if his license would have been removed today given the sexual nature of parts of the trauma that I experienced with Mr. Beck.
Stephen Beck appeared to be very charming in the early years. And I believed that he was an expert in everything. This role as expert was something he really reinforced. In addition to being my individual therapist, our family also did some work with him, my first husband and I engaged in couples counseling, and my former husband was in a men's group that Mr. Beck facilitated. We all experienced harm from these experiences.
Given how much unhealed trauma I continued to have and being deeply instinct injured, it took me years to truly grasp the nature of the trauma that I experienced, and my family, over the course of my/our therapy with Stephen Beck. I also felt enormous shame over how dependent I'd become on him. Today I understand that this harmful dependency was created by this therapist.
I also was so traumatized at the time that I broke off from the “therapy” with Stephen Beck that I developed fibromyalgia. Gratefully, I've since received therapy (mostly IFS – Internal Family Systems - therapy) that has empowered me in many ways, including the healing work that I've long needed for my history of generational trauma – and healing from the trauma I experienced with Mr. Beck. I am also now many years symptom free from fibromyalgia, I am happily remarried, and deep generational trauma has been radically healed and transformed. I have been haunted that I haven't spoken up sooner. And I am grateful today to finally share the truth of my harmful and traumatic experiences with this therapist. Molly Strong
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The original letter that I sent to the Oregon Board of Clinical Social Workers was 14 type written pages long. The scope of what I experienced over the seven years that I saw Stephen Beck is beyond what I can share here today. What follows are glimpses of some of my experiences which illuminate deeply disturbing and traumatizing patterns — many of which I have copied from my letter of complaint that I filed with the Board. I will do my best to summarize... (Please note that this summary is long and that you may want to skim or just go to the last part of my post today.)
- In the mid-1990s I initially sought counseling with Mr. Beck in the wake of my sons developing symptoms of trauma upon entering early adolescence. After years of sobriety and doing everything that I thought I had needed to do to "break the cycle" of generational abuse and addictions, I was heartbroken and deeply frightened.
- Right from the start, Mr. Beck presented himself as an "expert" who would be able to work well with our entire family. And, initially, there were positive changes in one of our sons which were very hopeful. The therapy then evolved into my former husband becoming a part of a men's therapy group led by Mr. Beck, and I entered into individual therapy. Off and on, Jim (my first husband) and I also engaged in couples counseling. I remember writing that Stephen Beck was a "therapist extraordinaire" where we could do one-stop shopping.
- Although I had engaged in counseling for over a decade, had done a lot of "inner child work," and was several years clean and sober when I first landed in a counseling session with Mr. Beck, there were deep places of loss and trauma that had remained stuck within me. One was the impact of never having been held by my mother, who was narcissistic and dangerous. My husband Jim was also not able to hold me or move towards me when I experienced grief because his own heart was deeply defended due to his untreated childhood trauma. Even through all the counseling I did, I was also never empowered to learn how to hold myself and unburden the starving baby and young child parts of myself who remained in exile within me. Working with childhood trauma is critical to our well-being, but only as we are empowered to increasingly connect with our Self and utilize our pain, addictions, and whatever we may be diagnosed with as trailheads to unburdening the trauma we carry. This did not happen for me over the course of my first two decades of seeking to "break the cycle" for myself and our children. I had also remained deeply instinct injured. And my connection with Self remained tenuous and impaired.
- The grooming first occurred early in my individual therapy with Stephen Beck. I had thanked and spontaneously hugged Mr. Beck at the end of one of our sessions. I meant nothing by it. But his reaction was to become frozen, which I could not understand and which bothered me. In the next session I asked him about his frozen response. He went on to say that a former woman client had filed a complaint and had made his life hell. This had occurred after she had asked him if there could be something between them if circumstances were different, in other words if he wasn't married. And he answered yes. She then ended up filing this complaint that reportedly turned his life into hell. I reacted by promising that I could never do anything like that to him. A while after Stephen shared this story and I reassured him that I would never take any kind of action against him, Stephen came up to me at the end of a session and held me closely and began to slow-dance quietly and also softly kissed the top of my head. This lasted a couple of minutes.
- I continued to believe that Stephen Beck had some “cutting edge” therapy techniques that worried my friends, but pulled me in deeper and deeper. One was to sit directly in front of me and hold my hand while asking me to speak to him of what was coming up for me while looking directly into his eyes. Well, what came up for me was the opening up of something inside myself that had been locked up for over 40 years. I began having intense physical sensations that would arise during sessions and off and on in-between sessions. I thought that I was tapping into and loosening places of trauma inside myself that had been frozen since I was a new baby. And tapping into that baby inside of me propelled me into this place of wanting to be held — of starving to be held. And this is what our "therapy" sessions came to embody — Stephen Beck holding me.
- Connecting with this starving baby/child parts of myself became what was now directing much of my life energy, focus, need. I lived for those sessions of being held. In our therapy, Mr. Beck had opened a doorway within me where I had become fused with these younger and incredibly vulnerable and traumatized parts of myself. I was fused rather than freed and empowered to learn how to hold myself and gradually unburden the pain and trauma of my very young exiled parts. Unknown to me, a traumatic bond was occurring between us. Sometimes Stephen would sing me wonderful songs, like “How could anyone ever tell you that you are anything other than lovable...” It felt like I was getting the love, the affection, the holding, the bonding, the protecting that I had never gotten. More and more, all I thought about between sessions was reliving how Stephen had held me in the previous session. It became an addiction that I was powerless over.
- More from my letter to the Board: Then, I’m not sure when, once in a while — not often — Stephen’s hand would go under my sweater on my back and onto my shirt underneath my sweater. I believe it was twice that Stephen’s hand also went under my shirt onto my bare back. Ever so briefly. It was like a tease. There were times when it felt like he was, I told myself, trying hard to restrain himself from acting on sexual feelings. I’m embarrassed to share this, but I told myself that Stephen was attracted to me, and I was attracted to him, but we were both maintaining incredible control overall and considering how much attraction there was. So in-between feeling very young, this adolescent part of me would suddenly be present. I told myself that I would not be able to continue seeing Stephen as my therapist unless I got a hold of myself and kept myself out of sexual feelings and fantasies. So I would pull myself out of those feelings and work to get back to that younger age where I did not feel sexual. But it was hard sometimes. Because then Stephen would move from holding me while sitting in his chair next to mine to a kneeling position on the floor in front of me. And then he would take me in his arms and move us down on the floor and he would hold me while we sat on the floor with me pretty much in his lap. When Stephen moved to take me into a lying down position on the floor to hold me while lying down side by side, my sexual feelings immediately were upon me and I sat myself — and both of us — back up. Again, I felt that it was my responsibility to keep myself from having sexual feelings or I knew I would have to stop therapy with him. But I was completely addicted to his holding me and could not imagine stopping the holding. So I made myself, or convinced myself, that I could control my sexual attraction toward him and could keep my focus on being little and on being held, which is what I felt like I wanted — I needed — more than air to breathe.
- Sometimes Mr. Beck would also share with me about his other clients, which I justified at the time as part of our “specialness”. By then, my addiction and deep dependency on him blinded me to what should have been healthy boundaries and client-therapist relationships. One example was when he was late for our session. I saw Mr. Beck walk through the waiting area with a young attractive woman client, who had obviously been crying, and lead her into the kitchen where they talked a bit. After she left, he told me that this woman had been calling him repeatedly at his home and that he almost had to tell her to not come back (as his client); but Mr. Beck said that they worked it out and he didn’t feel that she would be a problem anymore. I could not imagine that would be me at some time in the future.
- Mr. Beck also told me about how it was working with "multiples" — dissociative identity disorder (previously known as multiple personality disorder). He also spoke of how he was having problems trying to keep his DV couples (whom he would see together) from killing each other. Another time, Mr. Beck shared with me how a woman had stripped naked in his office and then refused to get dressed. So he had to leave his office for a while until this client finally got dressed and left.
- The painful struggles in my marriage continued to deepen. Then Jim and I did another couples session with Mr. Beck. This is when I went into a place of expressing deep grief. Again copying from my letter to the Board —Stephen interrupted the pain that I was expressing and said, “Molly, you need to act civilized”. That devastated me. In my next individual session I expressed how hurt and devastated I’d been by Stephen’s words to me to “act civilized”. Stephen responded with treating this as a contest of wills, exerting himself as the “expert” who knew what he was doing and who would not apologize, would not offer any empathy or understanding of my feelings and needs of him, and who clearly communicated to me that he would do nothing different. Stephen often would listen, sometimes hold me in the midst of my sharing and tears, and ultimately respond the same way — by telling me how he was seeing Jim make progress in the men’s group. It was a complete contradiction to the experience that I was bringing to Stephen Beck. That was when I decided to only bring myself to sessions to be held and to refrain from bringing up anything to do with my painful marriage. I was continuing to further fragment.
- My former husband stayed in the men's group with Stephen Beck for several years. At one point earlier on I shared with Mr. Beck that Jim had just finished reading an amazing book that I had also just read by Terry Real called I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression. I gave him my copy and hoped that Mr. Beck would read it. After all, this was the first book that my then husband had ever read front to back and was thoroughly engaged in. This was the kind of therapeutic support that Jim could identify with and wanted. And I had never before read anything that so mirrored Jim and me and our marriage. Mr. Beck gave me back the book in our next individual session and told me that he knew way more than Terrance Real and that I needed to not try to tell Stephen Beck how to run his business. I could not see at the time that the dismissal and denigration by Mr. Beck of the wisdom Terry Real illuminated in his book would become increasingly devastating for both myself and my first husband.
- I tried to leave my marriage three times during the years that I saw Stephen Beck. The first time I called my therapist at his home (he readily gave out his home number) and I asked for reassurance that he would be there to support me in leaving Jim. But Mr. Beck wasn't answering his phone or calling me back. From my letter to the Board: When I did finally reach him by phone, I asked Stephen why he hadn’t called me back and again communicated how much I needed his support. Stephen responded: “I told you that I am here to support the marriage. Maybe at some later time, maybe in two weeks, I’ll feel differently. But today I cannot support you leaving the marriage.” What followed after that phone call were hours in which I collapsed and became paralyzed on our bathroom floor. For hours I could not move. Finally, and not feeling like I had any support to do so, I relented and told Jim that I wouldn't leave him. The following Tuesday session I tried to tell Stephen what had happened for me on that bathroom floor in response to his words to me. I tried to communicate how much he had hurt me. Stephen communicated in essence that he was the expert, I was not to tell him how to run his business, and that he would do nothing different. He “wasn’t going to budge”. Stephen then did not want to talk about it any further. That was the first time that I truly knew that I had to leave Stephen — who I also tried to leave several times.
- A couple of years later, and after one other unsuccessful attempt to leave Jim in-between, Stephen was now ready to support me leaving the marriage. And, as crazy and irrational as it sounds today, through these years and a lot of painful and traumatic experiences with Stephen Beck, the very young parts of myself continued to be utterly dependent on being held while my older parts believed that what Mr. Beck and I had was something very "special." From my letter to the board: I determined that I would find out if Stephen really loved me. [This was two days before I would tell Jim that we would be separating and divorcing.] My remorse is mostly, again, related to Emily, Stephen’s wife who had nearly died of cancer five years earlier. I thought that there was still a probability that Emily may die in the near future. So on Tuesday, February 12th, 2002 I arrived at my session scared to death, but in Scarlet O’Hara mode. I began the session in the same chair that I had sat in for over six years. Then I moved to the chair positioned next to me. And I looked Stephen squarely in the eyes and said that today I was here, not as his client, but as Molly, a woman who had known Stephen for many years and cared deeply for him. And then I told Stephen that I had the same question that that other women had voiced to him all those years earlier: Could there be anything special between us? Could we, given that his wife was ill, have a future together as a couple? Stephen looked at me and asked, “Are you sure that you are not wanting to be a client now?” I assured him that I was. At that time, Stephen looked right into my eyes and said nothing more, got out of his chair and came over to me, got down on his knees in front of my chair and held me tightly and began to wildly caress my bare back with both his hands. He then pulled me out of my chair and onto the floor, where we tumbled side by side and on top of each other, rolling on the floor, and then with me ending up on top of him. Stephen continued to hold me tightly and to kiss my head and face repeatedly. There was no mouth to mouth kissing. There was no other skin to skin touching beyond his hands on my bare back and kissing my cheeks, forehead, and head. But to me, this was it. Stephen wanted to have a “forever” relationship with me when the time was right. I would wait. We really did not speak during that “session”.
- More from my letter to the Board: In the following session Stephen told me in essence that he hadn’t meant anything by what had happened, that he loved his wife, and that he had only meant to demonstrate for me a glimpse into what it would feel like to be with a man, i.e. a “real man." So — in the middle of telling my husband of nearly 30 years that I wanted a divorce — this “session” was supposed to have been therapeutic, and for me to think anything different was a misinterpretation of what had happened on my part. Stephen also threw... was it a pen?... threw something across the room, obviously very upset, briefly expressing anger at himself for what had happened. Stephen said that he felt badly and wanted to make it up to me. Today, I also believe that he was very scared about the power I had to take action against him. Only I was no where close to thinking about doing anything like taking legal or any other kind of action against Stephen. I actually felt deep shame and both devastated by his words, and also — insanely — I felt protective of him. Oh, I thought, he feels so badly about what had happened. And he even cleared his schedule so I could come back the following morning and see him at no cost.
- In the wake of our separation and impending divorce, Jim quit the men's group and began drinking after 17 years of abstinence. From my letter to the board: I learned that Stephen still asked and arranged for Jim to come out to Stephen’s home one last time to do one last paperhanging project for Stephen to help pay off some of MY therapy sessions that Stephen had allowed me to keep track of and not pay until I could while I continued to see him. I called Stephen when I learned of this, and expressed that I did not want Jim to take responsibility for what I owed Stephen. Stephen also knew that this man who’d been his client for 6+ years was not doing well, and that since the separation Jim was often angry/enraged, that he was sometimes having very scary suicidal ideation, that he was verbally abusive to me and sometimes to our middle son, and that Jim was drinking. Stephen still had Jim come out and do the wallpapering job for him at his home. I can’t describe how yucky this feels to me... along with so much... So much.
- Several people in my life expressed concerns to me over the years about Stephen Beck. I'll speak to two of them. One was a clinical supervisor that I had where I was employed at the time. She told me that she had gone through graduate school with Mr. Beck and was very disturbed by him as they each worked towards their MSW degrees. She shared with me that her deep discomfort was also shared by her peers. Another was a dear friend who had learned through her husband, who was friends with Jim, that Stephen was “pitting” Jim and me against one another, and that Stephen was saying deeply degrading, derogatory things about me to Jim in the men's group — all during the time that I was still seeing Stephen in individual therapy. From my letter to the board: This time frame of when this would have happened was when Jim was drinking and tormenting me and sometimes scaring me with verbal abuse while we were still living under the same roof, and shortly before Jim quit the group with Stephen. I believe that there are times when Stephen intentionally plays people who are in a great deal of pain against one another. This is hard for me to say, but I believe it to be true.
- Approximately five years after our divorce, Jim and I had a long conversation in which we were able to express forgiving each other for the pain that we each experienced over our 31 years together. It was in that conversation that Jim revealed to me that Stephen Beck had told him that I had fallen in love with him. My eyes fill with tears of grief and outrage as I write this... I told Jim that nothing could be farther from the truth. And I apologized for pulling us all into what I had now realized was therapy with a narcissist. And now Jim is dying from his addictions and untreated pain and trauma. Our sons and I will never know if things could have been different had we had a therapist like Terry Real and others like Richard Schwartz who developed IFS (Internal Family Systems). There is much tragedy in the wake of our experiences with Stephen Beck.
- I tried to leave Mr. Beck several times. One was following yet another traumatic session four months into my separation from my former husband and while Jim and I were still living under the same roof. From my letter to the board: I showed up for a session expressing my confusion, need, hurt, and sadness with Stephen that he had not called me back and been in touch with me in-between sessions. Then, to my utter shock, Stephen grew intense, furious, and told me: “LEAVE!!” I could not believe what was happening. Stephen was demanding that I leave! All I could do was sit there in shock, paralyzed. I could not speak or move. Suddenly, Stephen shot out of his chair and stormed out of the room. I heard him loudly storming down the stairs, through the front downstairs waiting area, and going out the front door, slamming the door behind him....It felt to me that his attitude was that I was this needy woman who was irritating him greatly. Stephen could not see what my experience was or that it had any validity. He very clearly blamed me for “driving” him to such anger.
- From my letter to the Board: When I told Stephen in our next individual session that I would not be coming back, again and again he promised to make it up to me. He then said that he would charge me nothing for coming to see him every week. And he said that he would call me each night to check in. It was like going from one extreme to the other. Finally, I relented and agreed to come back. Stephen cleared a time for me to return the next morning. And when I did, he shared with me that he could hardly sleep the night before because he continued to feel so badly that he had caused me so much pain. This was crazymaking and in complete contradiction to the numerous times in which he demonstrated cruelty, heartlessness, and a complete absence of empathy and compassion. He cannot tolerate any threat to his image as an expert who needs to be in complete control of his "business."
- It was such a toxic and traumatic roller coaster with this man. And the traumatic bond and toxic dependency which Mr. Beck absolutely created and which fueled my addiction to him was incredibly powerful and overwhelming. It took 11 more months before I finally walked away and never came back. And that is when I developed fibromyalgia. I absolutely knew that the pain my body was experiencing was directly tied to the trauma I had experienced with Stephen Beck and coupled with old unhealed trauma that I'd experienced through my childhood. Gratefully, my doctor knew my history, advised me to "not get stuck in my diagnosis," did not prescribe any pain medication, and sent me off to receive alternative care. I've now been symptom free for 20 years.
- It was yet another year after "breaking up" with Mr. Beck that a friend — who knew that I had an aging narcissistic parent — strongly recommended the book The Wizard of Oz and Other Narcissists: Coping With One-Way Relationships in Love, Work, and Family by Eleanor Payson. And yet as I was reading this excellent book, it wasn't my mother was kept coming up for me. It was Stephen Beck. I became incredibly sick for three days as I began to really get it that my family and I had been seeing a narcissist for therapy over all those years.
- It took me another year before I was able to bring myself to write the Oregon Board of Clinical Social Workers my complaint regarding Stephen Beck. I first needed to begin to embrace a whole new layer of denial, minimization, shock, shame, embarrassment, guilt, regret, anger, trauma, sadness, and grief regarding my experiences with Stephen Beck. And I also needed to come to terms with the fact that I had referred people I knew and cared about to this man. I've needed to grieve that, too.
- I will just share a glimpse into one of the people I had referred to this man. She was someone I had worked with who I knew was struggling with concerns about an anorexic son and in the aftermath of separation from her husband. Her description of her husband also made it crystal clear that he was a narcissist and that she had been suffering from narcissistic abuse for years. I learned that her individual therapy with Stephen Beck quickly moved to family therapy, and initially her son appeared to make some positive changes which were hopeful for my friend. At the same time, her daughter refused to see Mr. Beck and found him "creepy." And then she moved back in with her husband and the abuse continued. Soon her two sons were also also acting abusively toward their mother. And her teenage daughter became an addict and ended up in an abusive relationship with a much older man, who Mr. Beck had told her to not worry about because he had "checked into who the man was" and he wasn't significantly older. Only he was. Her underaged daughter was seeing a man in his 30s. When my friend ultimately divorced and moved out for good, she also ended her therapy with Stephen Beck. Meanwhile, her husband had continued his individual therapy and had also grown to have a friendship with Stephen Beck that included going to the Beck house for barbeque. I asked my friend if she would be willing to join me in writing the Board of Clinical Social Workers and she didn't out of fear of repercussions from her former narcissistic husband and her former narcissistic therapist. She also felt deep shame in being pulled so deeply into this toxic relationship with Stephen Beck — and especially because she herself was a therapist who held an MSW degree.
"... we are a group of EMDR practitioners who offer 6-10 pro bono EMDR sessions to women who are victims of violent crimes. Specifically, we have aligned with the Family Preservation Project and are delivering services to women being paroled from prison to promote their adjustment and transition into their lives with their children and families."
There are many reasons why I am convinced that Stephen Beck has serious issues with women — especially vulnerable women who carry deep trauma — and with power and control. His lack of healthy boundaries and his blind spots are breathtaking. As is his arrogance and sense of entitlement.
Beyond this, I also see on Mr. Beck's website — along with many misspelled words and grammatical errors — practices that he utilizes that are questionable and of concern. Among these is Polyvagal Theory which the scientific community does not consider to have a valid scientific basis and which there are no credible studies to support it.
In addition, yet another concern is how Mr. Beck presents himself as an expert in everything, including EMDR. I need to illuminate that with the excellent therapist who I have seen in the aftermath of my traumatic experiences with Stephen Beck, I can testify that EMDR can be one part of a therapy practice which does indeed facilitate deep healing, unburdening, and significant shifts and changes related to trauma. That said, Mr. Beck did his version of EMDR with me, which he said was different from how it's usually taught and practiced, but "more effective." Because he's the "expert" and believes that he knows better than so many others. The reality, however, is that the deep generational trauma that I entered into my therapy with Stephen Beck with not only remained when I left several years later, but was exasperated to a deeply detrimental and harmful degree.
From my letter of complaint to the Board: What I know about Stephen Beck today is that he cannot handle anyone challenging him. When he can’t feel good about his effectiveness with his clients, when his clients don’t mirror back what a great “expert” he is, that is when he has taken another dark direction. It is similar to the sadistic nature of my mother and other narcissistic people like her. As long as his clients are adoring, all is well. But if his narcissistic reality is not mirrored, or if a deeper level of empathy is being asked for, Stephen becomes angry. Sometimes he used to justify his anger toward me and others also because he was “German” and it was just in his “nature”. Stephen was not responsible/accountable for his anger — and he also labeled me as the one who “caused” his anger.
I do not believe that Stephen Beck will ever change. I believe that he will continue to pose a risk to others. Like yet another concerned dear friend kept trying to help me see, and who is herself a therapist, it's not that Stephen Beck won't change — he can't.
Some of us are capable of healing from traumatic experiences with a therapist or other professional in a position of power. And some of us are not. As I write these words today, I am aware of how close my former husband is to dying and what a miracle it is that he is even still alive. And my tender-strong heart still aches for the help and support that we had so desperately needed all those years ago and — not only did not receive — but also had deep layers of pain and suffering added onto the generational trauma that each of us had already carried through our lifetimes. The ripples of harm continue to be felt to this day in our family.
All this said, I need to again affirm that we humans can heal, unburden, and transform our deepest losses and trauma. I wrote this piece related to the amazing blessings of living an increasingly Self-led life today: https://mollystrongheart.blogspot.com/2025/08/reflections-on-many-blessings-of-living.html. My heart overflows today with gratitude. And I am reminded of the wisdom of Francis Weller who has said that "the work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and be stretched large by them." So true. So true.
I am also reminded that all that I am sharing here which sheds light on the shadow side of this one man and the consequences of his harmful practices is also much larger than Stephen Beck or myself. Narcissism is embedded in our unhealthy culture. I am not at all unique in having had a narcissistic parent and, as a result of unhealed trauma, being drawn to a narcissistic therapist. In my perspective, coming to better understand narcissism, which is one aspect to the shadow side of our country and beyond, is both empowering and important. I recently reposted this related piece: https://mollystrongheart.blogspot.com/2025/08/an-excellent-book-wizard-of-oz-and.html.
So many of us have been deeply harmed by someone who is imprisoned in the illness of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. That said, the gifts of facing and embracing the wounds we have experienced from relationships with someone who is narcissistic — or anyone who is severed from the heart of wisdom, compassion, and love embodied in their Self — are empowering and profound. Both Stephen Beck and my once severely narcissistic mother have taught me very painful and hard won lessons for which today I am grateful.
While I wouldn't wish this kind of traumatic harm and pain on anyone, there is great hope for those of us who have suffered and been injured in this way if we are able to connect with true sources of wisdom, compassion, and empowerment. The invitation is to find whatever sacred resources of deep and soulful support that we need to ultimately come to embody the wisdom of the alchemist — transforming our diagnoses, our struggles and pain and suffering, our depression and anxiety and addictions, our shame and fear and disconnection, and all of the many symptoms of trauma into a doorway, a trailhead illuminating the sacred path into the wholeness, strength, wisdom, compassion, and fierce love that is our true essence.
In the midst of great suffering, it is my belief and experience that great healing and awakening is also trying to be born within us as individuals and collectively. As we begin to come out the other side on our hero's journey of embracing our own deep shadow work, there are countless ways in which our healing, unburdening, wisdom, and love creates ripples which move outward in ever evolving and sacred ways. We grow increasingly into becoming vehicles of kindness, love, and peace that our shared hurting and beautiful world hungers for.
And certainly one of these ways of being of sacred service and empowerment, which I illuminate in this piece that I write today, is to shine bright light on dark places and, in doing so, we add to the healing rather than harm that we experience and witness within ourselves, our planetary sisters and brothers, and our Earth Mother. There are so many hard earned lessons that we can bring into the intimate and universal conversations and relationships which remind us again and again of who we truly are and that the most powerful medicine of all is always Love.
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| Photo by Molly |
2 comments:
I am horrified about what you went through. I understand as much as I can. I was a practicing therapist for 50 years. I did not know Mr. Beck nor his work. I am familiar the these type of stories.i am so relieved by your healing and well being even in the weight of all your pain. I made mistakes and was cited by my board with a fine. It was a very growthful experience for me and I continue to review my years of work and sometimes can only wish I did no permanent harm. I admire your persistence and hope good can come from it.
Thank you for sharing. Many blessings. 🙏🏼
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