Healing is F*ing Hard

We Called It the Blues — Depression, Masking, and the Silent Battles Nobody Saw

My grandmother called it the blues. My mother called it the devil. And I grew up in a household where neither of those words left room for what was actually happening inside me, which was that I was a child carrying a depression so complete and so silent that the people who loved me most looked at my stillness and called it strength. This episode is about what gets missed when we don't have language for what we are living inside. It is about the Black children who perform capability so thoroughly that their suffering becomes invisible, about the cultural and spiritual frameworks that have historically stood in the place of clinical care in our communities, and about what it actually means to be depressed in a Black body, which does not always look like sadness and does not always ask for help and does not always get seen even by the people in the same room. As both a psychotherapist and someone who has carried this diagnosis since my teenage years, I am bringing you the clinical understanding and the personal truth in the same breath. Because I think that is the only way this conversation is actually useful. This is the first episode in a four part mental health series and it is the one I needed someone to make for me a long time ago. If anything in this episode brings up feelings that feel bigger than you can hold, please reach out to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by call or text, any time. Find me on Instagram, Threads or Twitter @darrynkrobinson. Interested in working with me? Check out my website at holistichealingtherapy.co [holistichealingtherapy.co]

Charging What You're Worth When You Were Never Taught You're Worth It

For over a decade my motto was the struggle is real. And I meant it literally. Crippling debt, bankruptcy in my early twenties, living in Southern California on community mental health wages while the spiritual community told me to raise my vibration. You cannot manifest from a nervous system in survival mode. And nobody was saying that out loud. This episode is about money and what it actually means to be a Black healer, a Black therapist, a Black woman in a helping profession who was never taught that her worth had a dollar amount. We're going into why Black therapists don't accept insurance and why that is a systemic failure not a personal choice, what the wound around worth actually looks like in practice, and why I started doing Reiki for free long after I was ready to charge. Forty percent of my practice is pro bono or sliding scale. I have been in private practice and have not yet raised my rates. I am telling you this not because I have it figured out but because I think the most radical thing a Black woman in a helping profession can do is tell the truth about what this actually costs. Find me on Instagram, Threads or Twitter @darrynkrobinson. Interested in working with me? Check out my website at holistichealingtherapy.co [holistichealingtherapy.co]

What Juneteenth Actually Means — Liberation, the Body, and Who Gets to Tell the Story

On June 19th 1865 Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas and told Black people what had already been true for two and a half years. That they were free. The delay was not accidental. Freedom had been the law of the land and the people it applied to were kept in bondage through deliberate deception. This episode is sacred and it is political and it is personal. I'm sharing a story about a friendship that ended, about what happens when Black women educate white people about their own history and watch that knowledge get worn like a costume in white rooms with no attribution and no acknowledgment of where it came from. I'm giving you the full history of Juneteenth because it belongs to us and we deserve to know it completely. And I'm talking about what liberation actually feels like in the nervous system of a body that has been conditioned for generations to brace. We close with an ancestral ritual to honor the ones who chose the water instead of bondage. The ones who did not survive to see June 19th but whose radical self determination made every freedom that came after possible. This one is for us. Find me on Instagram, Threads or Twitter @darrynkrobinson. Interested in working with me? Check out my website at holistichealingtherapy.co [holistichealingtherapy.co]

Grace for the Ugly Parts: On Being a Healer Who Is Still Healing

I kept seeing clients while my body was shaking. While I was losing weight rapidly, not sleeping, not eating, running on empty in ways most of my clients never knew. This episode is for every healer, therapist, helper, and caregiver who has ever held space for someone else while privately coming undone. We're talking about what it actually means to be a wounded healer, the cultural messaging that taught so many of us, especially in BIPOC households, that suffering in silence is strength, and why my clinical supervisor Dr. Lopez gave me permission that my upbringing never could. Self disclosure is not weakness. It is a clinical tool. And grace for the ugly parts of your own healing is not optional. It is the foundation. This one is personal and it is necessary. Find me on Instagram, Threads or Twitter @darrynkrobinson. Interested in working with me? Check out my website at holistichealingtherapy.co [holistichealingtherapy.co]

What Nobody Tells You About Grief: Loss, the Body, and Learning to Feel it All

Grief is not reserved for death. And nobody tells you that. In this episode I'm talking about what grief actually is, where it lives in the body, why the five stages were never meant to be a checklist, and why your loss counts regardless of what caused it. We're going into anticipatory grief, the grief that arrives before the loss, how highly anxious nervous systems begin mourning months before an ending even happens, and what it actually looks like to move through grief rather than just push past it. I'm also recording this one from inside some fresh personal grief, which felt like exactly the right time to have this conversation. Guided ancestral breath practice included. Find me on Instagram, Threads or Twitter @darrynkrobinson. Interested in working with me? Check out my website at holistichealingtherapy.co [holistichealingtherapy.co]