Practice Stories
Licensed professional counselor · trauma specialist, NJ
A New Jersey trauma specialist on being known as "Faintland" in high school, the diagnosis that became a gift, and the philosophy she built out of both: choose your healthy.
Before she was a licensed professional counselor, before Caitlin's Counseling Corner, before the motto that now anchors her practice, Caitlin was a teenager whose mental health symptoms showed up in her body. "My symptoms produced in a physical manner," she says, "so I had what some used to be called conversion disorder, and my mental health symptoms converted into the physical symptom of fainting." The nickname followed her through high school. "I wasn't Caitlyn, I was Faintland," she says. "That was the entire way I was known as — just the girl who fainted and was sick."
What she doesn't hide, and wants said plainly, is what came next. "I then started to struggle with suicidal ideations and binge eating disorder, and purging at one point in time," she says. "This took me through high school and college and my mid-20s." She was 23 when she finally received a diagnosis — bipolar 2 disorder — after over a decade of searching for an answer that fit.
Most people brace for a diagnosis like that as bad news. Caitlin describes hers as the opposite. "That moment was actually a beautiful healing moment," she says, "of like, yes, it makes sense. I have answers that fit." It's become the core teaching she now gives her students and her clients: "A diagnosis shouldn't be a label that we feel burdened and broken by. It should be a gift that we resonate with and are told, like, this is not a death sentence, but the path forward to finding your healthy." She names the shame she grew up around directly — "growing up, there was a lot of shame... you can't talk about this, you can't be open about it" — and credits her parents for never adding to it. Others in her life were not as kind.
Caitlin's leap into advocacy wasn't limited to language. It showed up in how she managed her own care. When one of her psychiatrists refused to approve electroconvulsive therapy, she didn't accept the answer. "I found it myself. The research on it myself," she says. "One of my psychiatrists wouldn't approve it. I fired them. Walked into the ECT center nearest to me, said, 'I want this. I've read the research.'" The doctor on site, she says, "was impressed with what she called my gall." Eight years later, she's still doing ECT, and the results speak for themselves in her own account: "I don't have major mood episodes anymore... I don't have mood episodes anymore because I put my own tools into place."
That self-authored stability is what let her turn thirteen years as a high school English teacher, spent quietly counseling families and teenagers, into a full second career: eight years now as a licensed trauma specialist, certified in accelerated resolution therapy, an adjunct professor training the next generation of counselors, and the founder of Caitlin's Counseling Corner, which she's building toward becoming a nonprofit serving Monmouth and Ocean County. "I don't do this for the money," she says. "This is a vocation, and I'm giving it my all."
"Choose your healthy" isn't a slogan Caitlin picked for marketing. It's a rejection of the framework she thinks the mental health field still leans on too heavily. "I don't look at these diagnoses as disorder or illness," she says. "I think it's a mistake that we function on an illness model. We need to function on a wellness model where these can be conditions that can be learned to manage, and people can live and thrive." Her belief is broader than any single diagnosis: "my true belief is just that all voices matter, and we need to support people just being able to find their own identity." She's candid that not everyone in her life models that. Peers were cruel. The word "calm down," she says, was the most hated phrase of her adolescence. "If it was that easy, I'd be doing it."
Caitlin isn't reflexively anti-technology — she points to telehealth's real reach into rural communities and clients too depressed to travel thirty miles for a first session. But she's lived close enough to the stakes of her field to be exacting about where AI belongs and where it doesn't. She brings up the case that has stayed with clinicians across the country: "we saw the very tragic case of a teenager who used ChatGPT and it was told yes, go ahead and commit suicide." She wasn't the clinician on that case, but she carries it. "My heart breaks for that family," she says, and she's glad it forced a change — that AI tools now have to "immediately answer, seek out a person... seek out 988," the national crisis line, when a conversation turns toward self-harm.
That tension — between AI genuinely widening access to people who'd otherwise get no help at all, and AI's real capacity to fail the most vulnerable people at the worst possible moment — isn't one Caitlin has fully settled. She still hasn't decided how much trust the technology has earned versus how much oversight it still needs, especially for clients in crisis. What she has settled is what she wants people to walk away with regardless: "we don't have to survive life meagerly in the muck of it. We can live and thrive in the enjoyment. It won't be thriving all the time, but you can find your healthy."
Watch the full conversation to hear how she gets there with her own clients.