As a peer support group facilitator for NAMI SF since 2023, I’ve been able to practice and confirm my interest in the counseling psychology field. My roles and skills have included running check-in and check-outs, co-leading and managing group, crisis management, and providing feedback. My volunteer experience with NAMI allows me to use my strength in empathizing with others and helping them realize their potential.
My journey (back) to NAMI SF
I first attended therapy in 2015 through my university’s mental health resources and I haven’t stopped since. I credit therapy for giving me the sense of self and growth I never got to develop as a parentified child.
I learned from watching my parents throw vases in Orlando when fighting, seeing people of color spit racist vitriol at one another in high school in Forest Hills, and hearing the same micro-aggressions years later in San Francisco that I value mental health and social justice above what my parents taught me success was. After all, I have already achieved success. (Minus getting married [which I would really like, please see birth chart]. and having kids [do not want]). I had a point to prove–I was no longer interested in sacrificing my values and my mental health for a career that my industry and the world wants to replace with AI anyway.
Shortly after I reported experiencing discrimination in the workplace, I voluntarily admitted myself to John George Psychiatric Hospital. After being released through a court hearing, I ended up involuntarily admitted into a residential group home and then into Del Amo Hospital’s Narcotics Treatment Unit, totaling 20 days in psychiatric holds where I endured and witnessed even more trauma from the failures of the healthcare system in actually treating patients in crisis, beyond just myself. The irony I felt while studying the posted resources on the walls of the second time and seeing NAMI listed as a resource felt a bit awesome in the moment. Experiencing psychiatric crisis environments first-hand taught me how to survive each day locked in there. I found solace in my ability to connect with any of my fellow patients regardless of their background or diagnoses.
I want to become a trauma-informed psychotherapist to help right the wrongs I’ve seen in psychiatric hospitals and in bad therapy sessions. I desire to make a lasting positive influence on others like me who come from backgrounds of prolonged trauma and toxic family systems, childhood abuse, and cultural stigma. I especially want to become a therapist for my own queer POC community knowing how unsafe I’ve felt as a non-binary lesbian in many spaces, even the proclaimed “safe” ones.’
But I learned a lot about myself in the process, and I feel a renewed desire to return to NAMI SF with a different perspective. I have more confidence in my abilities as a facilitator to handle members in crisis after experiencing mishandling of my own care by my providers.
I find inspiration in my relational skills and in my ability to make friends in a stressful environment,
A lot of strange things happened to me like a Rube Goldberg contraption or a set of dominoes tumbling down since October 28. And then they just kept happening.
But the hospitalization taught me how sociable I am, how ambiverted I am, how as my best friend Elli puts it, “it’s easy for others to feel safe around me.” Which is driven by my own fear of feeling unsafe in stressful environments and situations, which is often situations that shouldn’t feel scary, but none of the women in my family physically can distinguish it in their own bodies, and I’m letting go of the expectation that I need to beat myself up for that biological disability.