230. Meet Young Stephanie: My Untold Story, Drawn Out by Soad Tabrizi

I can’t believe I’m doing this.

My friend Soad Tabrizi — therapist, founder of Conservative Counselors, and a returning guest — asked if she could reverse-interview me about my own story, and I said yes. What came out was far more than I planned to share, and even if you’ve been following my work for years, it’s probably all new to you.

I talk about growing up a white girl near Compton and Inglewood in the 1990s, the racial scapegoating I faced as a child, and the nutritional and emotional neglect that shaped my body and nervous system for decades. I describe the father I’ve called an autistic narcissist, a mother who loved me but couldn’t see me, and the bullying that pushed me into a punk, anarchist, runaway adolescence. I trace the path from a near-fatal drinking incident at fourteen through cults in Hawai’i, the Hare Krishnas in LA, and finally a near-stranger’s intervention that sent me to college and, eventually, into this profession.

Why tell any of this? Because so much of what I teach parents — about willful children, suicide threats, meeting kids where they are, forgiveness, and how to apologize well — comes straight out of what I lived through, and went without. This is the person behind the professional, and the deficits that became my life’s work.

Podcasts are not therapy, and I’m not your therapist — but I hope my story helps you see your own kids, and yourself, with a little more grace.

Watch the full episode here on Substack. Click here to find it on your podcast listening platform of choice. Click here to find it on YouTube.

Soad Tabrizi is a licensed marriage and family therapist with more than 15 years of clinical experience. She runs a telehealth private practice from her office in Orange County, California, and is the founder of Conservative Counselors, a directory connecting clients with reality-based mental health professionals who share their values. Soad is a contributing opinion writer for Human Events and publishes a subscriber-supported Substack focused on the corruption and ideological capture of the mental health field, as well as commentary on culture and politics. She is known for challenging woke orthodoxy in mental health and encouraging conservative professionals to stop hiding their values and start speaking openly about them. She previously appeared on episodes 65. Conservative Patients in Therapy with Soad Tabrizi and 103. Truth, Hope, & Mental Health | Michael DC Bowen, Pamela Garfield-Jaeger & Soad Tabrizi.

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