Welcome to Future Waters

Finally doing the thing

Close friends and family will know that I’ve talked about starting a mental health Substack for years. When I went to write this post, I saw that I first created this account in 2023 (!). Sometimes we do the thing right away, and sometimes we take the long road….

I called this Substack Future Waters — a name that came to me a few years ago on a hike. For me, it evokes future building and dreaming a new world into being. While the world feels more chaotic than ever, I believe many of us are actively trying to heal and build the world we want to see. This writing is meant to be a part of that effort.

So why now? Well, in my 41 years of living, I realized I’ve gained a lot of knowledge about healing, mental health, and therapy — not as a trained therapist, but as someone who spent decades trying to feel better and heal. For much of my teens, twenties, and thirties, I suffered from low moods and pretty serious depression. I did my best to manage the ups and downs while appearing high-functioning to the outside world. In fact, to most, I probably seemed totally fine – good career, loving partner, close knit family, fun travels, etc. Inside though, I felt like I was constantly oscillating between good days and bad and the fog of hopelessness.

Like any good student and Virgo rising, I did my best to manage my depression. I saw therapists and psychiatrists, went on various anti-depressants, journaled, and read dozens and dozens of self-help books. While medicine would help stabilize the lows, nothing provided lasting relief.

Over time, I came to see my depression as an invisible part-time job. I compared it to a backpack full of rocks that I did my best to unload but somehow always filled back up again. Sometimes the weight felt tolerable, other times not at all. Perhaps most frustrating, the ebbs and flows were mysterious to me. Of course, basic self-care like good sleep and diet helped, but it wasn’t enough.

In 2020, I was running a startup when I had a serious bout of depression — one that affected my ability to show up in my business and in my personal life. After a good run of feeling grounded and even, I found myself pulled under by a heaviness and loop of negative thoughts. I was surprised and caught off guard. While the depression settled in, something else also happened: I felt a deep anger well up inside of me. I was angry that after 20+ years of “doing all the things” and working so. damn. hard. to feel better, I could still get taken out, seemingly out of nowhere.

At the time I was working with a business coach for my startup. During one of our sessions, she noticed my change in mood and how it was affecting my performance. She told me my business instincts were good but suggested I find a new therapist and look into trauma-informed therapy.

In the last 7 years, our understanding of mental health and trauma has increased dramatically. Trauma is now a word we all throw around, sometimes accurately, sometimes not. At the time though, I thought trauma was a reserved for serious one-off incidents or veterans who had gone to war. Since I fit into neither category, I did not think I had “trauma.” On top of that, my childhood was “completely fine!” and I had done a ton of therapy already, thank you. If trauma was the issue, surely someone would have mentioned it by now.

Despite my skepticism, I was desperate for relief. So I went to my friend google and started to research trauma-informed therapies. Immediately, I was amazed by what I found. I learned that most therapy today is based on cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT. CBT is commonly referred to as “talk therapy” and involves processing your problems verbally with a licensed therapist. It’s one of the most popular treatments for depression. It’s the most researched and is recommended in most treatment guidelines. A 2023 review of CBT studies found that it provided meaningful symptom reduction in 42% of people (compared to 19% control) with a 36% remission rate (study link). These are powerful results but they are also suggest that nearly 2/3 of people will not respond to treatment. I began to realize I was in this camp.

Through my research, I discovered a whole other world of modalities: Somatic Experiencing, EMDR, polyvagal theory, Internal Family Systems — all approaches that were very different from CBT and developed to help treat people with chronic depression and trauma in its many forms. Unfortunately, the clinical research for many of these modalities greatly lags that for CBT, so they are not typically taught in graduate psychology or social work programs or offered as a go-to recommendation for treatment guidelines. As a result, they are largely left out of the mainstream mental health and medical system.

Many of these modalities have greatly grown in popularity over these last few years, through word of mouth and popular books like The Body Keeps The Score. For me, learning about them was a light bulb moment. All this time I had been spinning my wheels, making some but limited progress over many years. I felt like I discovered an entire frontier of mental health work I didn't know existed. While I was immediately hopeful, I also felt confused: Why weren’t these other approaches more widely known? Why was it my business coach who hooked me up with this information? And why hadn’t one of the many therapists or psychiatrists I had seen ever mentioned this wider world of therapy to me?

I’ll never know why this knowledge didn’t cross my path sooner, but once I had it, I dove in. It was the pandemic, I was depressed, and for better or for worse, every therapist in America was now on Zoom. I decided to learn as much as could about alternatives to CBT and see what might work for me. I spent the next year experimenting, meeting different practitioners, trying different approaches, listening to what resonated. After some trial and error and a few false starts, I found a somatic experiencing practitioner and an IFS therapist trained in EMDR.

After just a few sessions doing IFS and EMDR, I felt an immediate shift. I’m not saying I magically healed overnight, but after a few sessions, I experienced more awareness, more healing, and more genuine insight than I had in years of talk therapy. With IFS in particular, it was like someone turned on the lights in my brain. I got a map of my mind and tools to engage with myself in a completely different way. I began to understand myself not as Johanna the depressed person but someone who has parts that get depressed, overwhelmed, and hopeless, and I began to learn how to engage and build a healing relationship with these parts of me.

Seven years later, after dedicated practice and through the support of some wonderful IFS therapists, I no longer identify as someone with depression. And perhaps most beautifully, I found IFS to powerfully heal my relationship with my most hurt parts, including my chronic suicidal ideation.

Such big changes made me a bit of an evangelist. If you’ve dabbled in the world of IFS, you’ll quickly learn this can be a common reaction. After experiencing such profound healing, I decided to get trained as an IFS practitioner myself. I completed my Level 1 IFS training in 2023 and Level 2 this past year, and for nearly two years, I had the incredible opportunity to work directly with IFS founder Richard Schwartz to help develop a strategy for bringing parts work beyond the therapy room and into collective systems. It's work I believe in deeply.

During this time, I lost two people close to me to suicide. With rates of depression rising in America, particularly among young people, and after experiencing such intense loss in my own life, I felt it was time to share what I’ve learned. I’m also very aware that our healthcare system is broken and that regular therapy is a privilege many cannot afford. I hope this Substack can be a way to pay forward what I’ve learned and a home for resources, tools, and honest writing for anyone else trying to navigate their inner world.

Most of my posts will focus on IFS and parts work, told through my own experience and everything I've learned along the way. I’ll also write about somatics, polyvagal theory, psychedelics, and rituals and tools that have supported me. I’ve also found that the deeper I go into my IFS practice, the more it takes me to unexpected places –shamanism, spirituality, the ancestral. I'll explore that here too. I’m also curious about how our inner work connects to larger systemic change and how paradigms like IFS can be maps for collective healing.

As the world grows more uncertain, I find we need practices to ground and center us more than ever, and we need to be sharing with each other, in community, how to heal and support each other. Healing ourselves and healing the world turn out to be the same work.

Thanks for reading and more to come!

x Johanna