Client Spotlight: How Therapy Changed My Life

Originally published in the August 13, 2026 Newsletter.

As therapists, the majority of the work that we do is concealed from the public. What happens inside the therapy room stays inside the therapy room, which remains a sacred container for our clients’ experiences. This gradual alchemical process, while hidden from the rest of the world, can be deeply transformational for our clients. With his permission, I sat down with John (name changed for privacy), a longtime Remarkable Services client, to talk to him about his experiences with therapy.

“Ninety percent of life is not predictable,” said John, “and people don’t overnight usually find themselves in a challenging situation. There's so little you can control as to what life comes at you. Mental health is something that you need to be aware of and monitor as if you have a cold or a chronic disease. It's the same thing. Your brain, it needs care. I didn't know that.”

Within a relatively short period, John lost his job, his home, his marriage, his pet, and many of the possessions that he had accumulated over a lifetime. Then he was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation (AFIB). The weight of these losses became more than he could bear, and he began contemplating suicide. It was only through therapy that John began to understand how the helplessness he felt in response to these experiences was connected to core beliefs about himself that had been formed decades earlier.

“I would say it started in childhood. It was a belief that I had about myself. I never had any agency. I never had any self-esteem. I never had any self-awareness. That was all taken away from me as a child. I wasn't allowed to make decisions. I didn't get agency into my 50s until I started getting psychotherapy. I was told not to dream by my parents, to just follow the plan and go work, study hard, get good grades, get into a good college, get a good job. They were very broken people, so they were very bad at leading.”

These beliefs followed John into adulthood, shaping the way he saw himself and the choices he made. At 18, as soon as he was legally able, John left his childhood home and moved 3,000 miles away from New York to San Francisco. Without a strong sense of direction or confidence in himself, he spent years searching for stability and connection. By the time he was 40, he fell in love and married a woman who already had three children. After fifteen years, the relationship ended, and John came to understand that the patterns he had learned in childhood had shaped the way he approached relationships.

“I was learning a lot of lessons the hard way. And it all starts with agency, self-esteem, and people that actually educate you and give you wings and teach you as a child what you really need to know. And so the marriage basically ended, I walked away in 2015.”

After his divorce, John faced another period of profound uncertainty. He sought out roommates again, but after several difficult living situations, he eventually rented a storage unit and began to live out of his car. He worked music gigs at farmers markets and earned extra money cleaning trucks, doing whatever he could to make ends meet.

“I made it work. I got homeless services, food banks. I was able to get showers Monday to Friday. It pissed me off that there wasn't anywhere I could get a shower on the weekend, especially during the summer. I had to spend two summers in my car, and it's horrific. Winters are easy. You just wear more. Summers, there's no escaping the heat. And homeless people are homeless every day. They're not just homeless Monday to Friday.”

John was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation (AFIB) after collapsing at one of his truck cleaning jobs. As he faced the possibility of surgery while homeless, years of grief, uncertainty, and fear resurfaced. In that moment, John felt overwhelmed by the belief that his life would continue to be defined by loss.

“That is when I decided to take my life. I said, if this is the way that my life is going to look, where everything I love, my best friend gone, my marriage gone, my pets. I gave all my stuff away and I was ready to kill myself, and I found myself in the middle of Todos Santos Park, sitting under the tree with my guitar, crying. I finally called 211. I said, ‘I want to kill myself.’ The guy said, ‘Hey, hey, don't do it for me, promise me you won't do it tonight. I can get you help.’ And he said, ‘Dude, we help people that have a lot harder stuff than you. We can help you. You're good. We got this. I promise. Just don't do it tonight.’”

The next day, John began taking Wellbutrin and started individual and group counseling. He had been crying every day for two years, and within a few days of starting the medication, he noticed a profound shift. Through therapy, he slowly began to feel connected again.

The combination of medication, counseling, and the gradual reconnection helped John begin rebuilding his life. Once he was able to move out of crisis, his curiosity urged him to seek deeper understanding and a new perspective on his life.

“In 2018, I went on an ayahuasca trip in Ecuador. I met the most amazing people from all around the world who were in my cohort, under the gazebo at night, 10,000 feet up in the Andes. I went to this doctor. I was trying to avoid the surgery, and I was trying to find a holistic way to avoid it. I sat there for two hours. When I was talking, she said, ‘So what do you think is your biggest problem? Is it a physical problem, an intellectual problem, an emotional problem or a spiritual problem?’ I said, ‘Spiritual?’ She said, ‘Exactly.’ 

“I said, ‘Everything I have loved, everything I worked for, gets taken away. And if I'm going to get better, because I'm as low as I've ever been in my life, to the point where I try to commit suicide. It's like I got this mountain of work. I've got these medical appointments, I have exercise, I have diet. I have to try not to be isolated. It's just a mountain of work that I got to do. And there's no guarantee if I climb this mountain that there’s even going to be results.’ 

“And she goes, ‘No, no, see, that's the problem. There is no mountain. There's only a stream. You're creating the mountain. The mountain does not exist. The mountain's in your head. You built this mountain. Every day you wake up. Surrender to the stream. The stream knows where you need to go.’

“That was the best $250 I had spent. It blew my mind. I mean, it just changed my perspective.”

This simple reframe changed John’s worldview. With the support of medication, therapy, and a new understanding of his experiences, he decided to shift his focus from ending his life to rebuilding it. He started looking for ways to restore his health, reconnect with others, and rediscover a sense of purpose. He reached out to the pastor at a church where he had been receiving services and asked if there was any way he could help.

“Two days later, he texted me this article from the Contra Costa Times. It was a joint venture between the Episcopalian Church and Contra Costa County. They would intake seniors and they would intake people looking for rooms. I got matched with this guy who was 92 years old. He was almost deaf. He just had his license taken away. I moved in, I started cooking for him, and we got along great. It was a match made in heaven. We got along so great. When he died, it was only four months later. But it was like, I'm good at this. That was my first foray into personal service, personal care.”

Caring for another person marked a turning point for John. What had begun as a practical solution to his housing needs became a much larger opportunity to rebuild the sense of connection he had spent much of his life believing was out of reach.

“I went from no connections to very deep connections by taking care of people, doing personal care. Reigniting the possibility of connection was very healing for me. And [so was] the perspective of knowing that you can make a difference, and you’re not worthless, and there is a place for you in this world.”

That realization became the foundation for a new understanding of himself. Rather than measuring his worth by what he had lost, John began to recognize it in the moments when he felt most connected. The more he healed, the clearer his sense of purpose became.

“I never feel more alive or more purposeful than either when I’m caring for someone or when I’m in the middle of writing a song and the words are flowing and the melodies are flowing. I can hear it, it’s like I’m taking dictation and I feel like I’m right in the right spot, right place in the universe, at the right moment, and I feel absolutely connected to the source. And it’s just like, this is where I was meant to be.” 

In retrospect, John recognizes that healing was not a single moment of change, but a series of decisions to remain open to connection, support, and possibility. When asked what advice he would offer to someone who may be struggling right now, John said, “You have to make the decision that your way ain’t working, that there is a better way, and put that energy toward the other way, towards saying yes to help, and just taking one day at a time. And that’s how I got out of the pit.”

John's story is not one of instant transformation or a single breakthrough. It is the story of many small moments that accumulated into a lifetime of lasting change. Much of the work happened quietly, inside the therapy room and beyond it, unseen by the outside world. Like so many therapeutic journeys, its greatest impact is often invisible while it is happening — it can only be understood with the perspective granted by time.