From Surviving to Thriving: PTSD, Complex PTSD and the Inner Critic Nobody Told Us Was a Trauma Response

You Were Not Built Wrong — Anxiety, High Sensitivity, and What "Toughen Your Skin" Actually Cost Us

I was told to toughen my skin so many times as a child that I eventually stopped being able to feel the difference between the sensitivity I was born with and the armor I built over it. This episode is about what that costs and what it is actually possible to reclaim. We are talking about anxiety today, what it actually is versus what our families and communities called it, and why the throat clearing and the pacing and the deep breaths with averted eyes that showed up in the people around me were never personality quirks, they were nervous systems doing the only thing they knew how to do with what they were carrying. We are also talking about the highly sensitive person, a neurological trait that Elaine Aron has spent decades researching, that affects approximately fifteen to twenty percent of the population, and that in Black and brown children gets pathologized or hardened out rather than understood and honored. The sensitivity was never the flaw. The world that asked you to amputate it was asking for something it had no right to. This is the third episode in a four part mental health series and it is the one for everyone who was ever told they were too much, too sensitive, too intense, when what they actually were was built for depth in a world that didn't know what to do with that. 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]

From Surviving to Thriving: PTSD, Complex PTSD and the Inner Critic Nobody Told Us Was a Trauma Response

I attended fourteen schools from kindergarten through high school. That is not just a statistic about instability. That is a childhood spent perpetually learning how to be the new kid, reading rooms and decoding hierarchies and adapting to new environments with a speed and a thoroughness that the people around me called resilience and that I now understand as a nervous system doing whatever it had to do to survive constant uprootedness. This episode is about PTSD and Complex PTSD, what they actually are, how they develop, and why so many Black and brown people are walking around carrying them without ever having had a clinician look closely enough to name what they are seeing. We are going deep into Pete Walker's framework around the inner critic, the internalized voice that develops when children grow up in environments that couldn't fully hold them and that turns the pain of those environments inward, insisting for years, sometimes decades, that the person was always the problem. I carry both of these diagnoses. I am bringing you the clinical understanding and the personal truth simultaneously because I think that is the only combination that actually reaches people who have spent their whole lives being told that what they were experiencing was their fault. This is the second episode in a four part mental health series and it is one of the most important conversations I have had on this show. 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]

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]