Starting therapy can be a leap of faith. It requires courage to walk into a room, sit down, and share parts of yourself that you may not even say out loud to your closest friends. When I started seeing Lisa Hurst Barnhardt, I had high hopes. I was ready to open up and do the work needed to better understand myself and my experiences. What I didn’t expect was to leave a session feeling dismissed and disrespected. I came prepared. I wanted her to understand who I was and where I had been before stepping into her office. To give her context, I wrote notes about my life from the previous ten years—a deeply personal account of my struggles, my growth, and the events that shaped me. I handed those notes to her, trusting that she would read them with the professionalism and empathy that I assumed all therapists embodied. But when I returned for our next session, I was met with a smirk. It wasn’t a smile of understanding or encouragement. It wasn’t a moment of connection. It was a smirk—disgus...
