Irina Harper (She/Her)

I was raised as a child under the verbal and relational abuse of my mother from infancy until I was 23. My father had an ideal form of the role he prescribed me, an ideal he had created years before I was ever born. I have spent a decade of my life shedding that ideal and healing from abuse. As a teenager I resolved to live differently than my rigidly unchanging parents – to learn, change, and grow. I was 22 when I came to understand how truly and thoroughly distant I was from that prescribed role by realizing I wasn’t even my parents’ firstborn son, but their firstborn daughter. For years I had apprehension and anxiety concerning therapy, despite an educational background in (social) psychology, but recently I began that journey as well. I am relieved to start this path and am deeply satisfied for the opportunity to help others find their therapists and start those paths of their own.