When the Therapist Fails First

If you know me, you’ve probably picked up on a few things—I’m a little quirky. I like structure, but I’m not afraid to break the mold. I’m what I like to call an A-type rebel. I color-code my planner and challenge the status quo, often in the same breath.

That mindset has shaped my clinical work from the beginning. I’ve never been the kind of therapist who just sticks to the script. Give me an evidence-based protocol, and I’ll honor it—but I’ll also adapt it to my client’s world. Pokémon? Let’s bring it in. K-pop? Let’s use it to practice exposure. I tweak, test, and experiment—not because I want to reinvent the wheel, but because I believe we can make the ride smoother, more personalized, more human.

That’s what drew me to clinical innovation. It’s this beautiful balance of “we know this works” with “let’s see how we can make it even better.” But innovation requires something that most of us were never really taught to celebrate: failure.

I’ve always tried to live by the values I share with others. So if I tell my team, my clients, or a healthcare organization that failure is part of the process—I mean it. I’ve lived it. And not just in quiet, behind-the-scenes ways. I mean messy, public, humbling failure.

And that brings me to one of the first clients who shaped me.

This blog is really for her—my “why” starts with her.

She was a 15-year-old girl from Hawaiʻi who hadn’t been to school in over two years. Panic disorder. Social phobia. Agoraphobia. Major depression. She’d done incredible work with a previous therapist and was finally ready to confront her agoraphobia and panic. I was a third-year grad student—still learning, still finding my rhythm—but fully committed to helping her succeed.

We started slowly, building trust. Eventually, we moved into interoceptive exposures. The kind that purposely bring on physical symptoms of panic—racing heart, dizziness, breathlessness—so that we can retrain the brain to handle them. One day, we took it to a crowded mall. I wasn’t going to just coach her through it; I was going to do every exercise with her, side-by-side.

So there we were, spinning in circles, trying to trigger dizziness.

And then I got sick. I mean really sick.

Dizzy. Nauseous. Totally disoriented. In the middle of a packed shopping mall. In front of my client. And everyone else.

I failed. Spectacularly.

But here’s the wild, beautiful part: that failure was exactly what she needed.

She didn’t need a flawless therapist. She needed a real one. Someone who could model what it looks like to be vulnerable and survive it. To mess up, laugh it off, and keep going. That moment cracked something open for both of us.

We stopped chasing perfection and started practicing presence. We let ourselves be seen. She began approaching strangers with questions she never would’ve asked before. We still used the evidence-based tools—but we used them as people, not robots.

And she kept showing up.

She went back to school.

She graduated.

She walked across the stage at her high school graduation—thousands of people watching in a giant stadium on her home island.

And when I asked her how she felt, she said something I’ll never forget:

“My anxiety isn’t gone. But I know that anything that comes up… I can handle.”

That, right there, is resilience.

That is the heart of Regenerative Psychology.

We don’t need systems that try to make people fearless—we need systems that teach people to live courageously with fear. Systems that make space for growth, for discomfort, for adaptation. For failure. Because healing doesn’t come from erasing symptoms—it comes from becoming stronger, deeper, more alive in the face of them.

And sometimes, that starts with spinning in a mall, getting sick, and realizing that failure isn’t the end. It’s the beginning.

That’s why I do what I do.

And that’s why I’ll keep building, keep tweaking, keep throwing things at the wall to see what sticks.

Because when it does—it changes everything.