The Naked Therapist – Stories from the Inside is a memoir that tells the story of a marriage and family therapist, thirty years in practice, and her circuitous, bumpy pilgrimage from child-woman to crone that listeners will resonate with. Unabashedly truthful, the author tells her story of how she happened upon a profession that spends much of its time polishing the image of “the knower,” and of her experience of herself as a pretender.

The author takes her listeners through the experiences that transformed her, accompanied by her imaginary guides, whom she calls “The Crones,” who yank her out of self-delusion and into the truth about her behavior. Arising from her mother’s addiction and her death by suicide when the author was just sixteen, she tells the stories of her lifelong struggle with anorexia, her career as a professional distance runner, the path from being a high school dropout to earning a doctorate in depth psychology, and her struggles with depression throughout.

She shares intimately about her abortion in 1976, her experience of trying to belong to the Christian church, but feeling she fell short of Jesus’s standards. She is fully transparent about her affairs during her marriage, being a single mother, and confronting her alcoholism while in graduate school. All the stories are shared with compassion for herself, humor, and a sincere intention to bring listeners with her in a way that invites them to fall in love with the orphaned parts of themselves.