Let’s get started!

My name is Mary Fierst, and I am the OG Woowoo Therapist. That moniker was given to me by a substance abuse client I worked with in 1997. He came back to see me after being clean and sober for a few years and told me that he had no idea what kind of woo woo I did on him for him to still be sober and that I was the OG of woo woo therapy. I kinda like it!

My journey to becoming a therapist was not an easy one but the journey made me who I am today and I very much like who I am today.

I have endured, survived and recovered from many of the life issues my clients have endured and survived which is what I think makes me capable of meeting my clients where they are in their recovery process when they come into therapy.

The things I have learned about myself along the way, with the knowledge and skills for managing my life and myself, are what put the woo woo in what I do with my clients in my psychotherapy practice.

I believe that spirituality is the secret to healing deeply and that without some kinds of spiritual practices to connect to the energy around us it can make it more difficult to connect to the energy within us. So many of the things that happened to me and likewise to my clients cut them off from the energy of who they really are. I tell all my clients that the goal of therapy is to become the person we were meant to be on the day we were born, before life started going sideways and knocking us off our personal path of truly being who we were meant to be. However, because of the sideways things we become a new improved version of who we were meant to be when we recover from the things we survived.

I have been a counselor therapist since 1997. I have worked with all types of folks including substance using teens and adults, incarcerated individuals, the homeless, county mental health clients, and have been in private practice since 2015 where I specialized in trauma and dissociative disorders.

I retired from my private practice on December 20, 2025, and was encouraged by my clients to start a blog or a podcast because they believe I have a lot of information that would help a lot of people in their journey. So, since I’m retired now, I will do both.

Some of the topics I am going to talk about are things I learned both as a client in psychotherapy and as a therapist.

This is not intended to take the place of counseling or therapy but to highlight some of the issues that could or need to be addressed with a licensed counselor or therapist. And for some, it will be information to increase understanding of therapeutic issues. None of the information that I am going to talk about should be used to self-diagnose or diagnose others with mental health disorders. Only a licensed practitioner can do that through the process of differential diagnosis.

Trauma is one of the most misunderstood issues to come up in therapy. There are basically two types of traumas. Big-T trauma where someone is in fear for their life like a car crash, combat, natural disasters, and severe physical abuse. The other is little-t trauma which is the result of emotional, mental, psychological, and spiritual abuse and the fear is of being annihilated.

In my experience most mental health issues have a component of little-t trauma with some exceptions with regard to personality disorders and schizophrenia. That’s not to say they haven’t had traumatic experiences but the brains in these folks do work differently which is the basis of their behaviors.  

In personality disorders the primary thing we see is that these folks lack conscience and are incapable of empathy which are characteristics produced by the function of certain features in the brain. The other thing we see is that these folks, much of the time, are the bringers of trauma to the people closest to them.

I’m sure you have heard about the “psychopaths” that have made it to notoriety like Ted Bundy, John Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson, BTK and others who have gone on killing sprees. One of the interesting things about these folks is, like with Gacy, Dahmer and BTK, their families had no idea about what they were doing as killers. There is a myriad of docuseries about these folks and their families who were surprised and in disbelief when they found out their loved one was a killer. Then there are those killers that tortured their families along with the other victims. These folks see nothing wrong with what they are doing to others, which is the lack of conscience, and they have no feelings about the suffering of those related to their victims or their own families, which is the inability to have empathy.

Then we have “sociopaths” like Dexter who believed he was driven by the higher good by killing killers. There are also a myriad of shows and docuseries on these folks as well. These folks also lack conscience and are incapable of empathy. Many of the notorious conmen and women along with pimps, crime lords, assassins, human traffickers, gang members and assorted others could be diagnosed as sociopath. Now this is not to say that all people who engage in these behaviors are sociopathic but one has to wonder about people when there is a propensity for harming others and not caring about the suffering it is causing as long as they are getting what they want out of it.

There are some folks that do get trapped into these lifestyles and they must do heinous things to not be hurt or killed themselves or to save their families. They do have conscience and empathy for those they caused to suffer. That is a different thing all together and something I will discuss in the future.

But for the most part sociopaths talk a good game but deep down they just don’t care about the feelings of others like the boss who fires an employee two weeks before Christmas and is unconcerned about the pain and suffering of the employee or their family.

Then we have the “narcissists” who have made the posts of social media consumers and have become the newest accusation for anyone who may be having a selfish moment or is afraid of some kind of unpleasant consequences. Narcissists are also incapable of empathy, but they go one step further and gaslight their victims into believing and feeling responsible for the abuse from the narcissist. Throughout my years as a therapist, I have worked with many clients who are victims of narcissistic abuse from the people they call mom, dad, grandma, or grandpa. That is not to say that brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins can’t be narcissists because many times they are. The trauma endured by victims of narcissistic abuse are some of the most difficult to help heal because of the deeply held core beliefs they have developed because of daily mental, emotional, psychological, and spiritual abuse at the hands of someone who is supposed to love and care about them. This will be discussed in greater detail in the future.

And just to finish out the brief overview of personality disorders we must mention borderline personality disorder. The thing about this disorder is that it is believed to have developed because of nature and nurture. In infancy we develop our most significant attachments to our primary caregivers. And when these caregivers are inconsistent with care and needs meeting of the infant then the infant learns not to trust or bond, which sets their brain development on a trajectory that cannot, most times be corrected. These infants develop an extremely anxious way of attaching to other people and then grow up to become individuals who test every relationship they have, be it friends, teachers, boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands, wives, or even their own children. They engage in a continual push/pull with relationships to test the consistency of the care they are receiving from someone until they make it impossible for the people who love them and care about them to stay in relationship with them. This will be discussed further on a future date.

The other disorder that falls under the brain not working “normally” is schizophrenia. This is not a personality disorder. Folks with schizophrenia are capable of very deep emotions and empathy for others. Which is a primary difference, and another is that the symptoms of schizophrenia can be managed with medication where personality disorders cannot.

One of the rules of thumb that I use to remember the difference when someone is in my client chair is, are the behaviors I’m seeing an indication of who they are or of how they are.

I will be discussing many of these topics further and a plethora of other topics in the future. Thank you for reading along and if you liked today’s topic give it a like and drop a comment. If there are other topics you would like to know about drop them in the comments and I will address them to the best of my knowledge and if I don’t know anything about them I can certainly provide you with a resource to find out.

I’ll be back next week.