Who I Am

I never wanted to be a therapist.

For most of my life, I actively avoided it. The whole idea made me uncomfortable. It implied that I had somehow figured out how to live, when I was still trying to figure that out myself.

But people kept coming to me anyway.

As far back as nursery school, I can remember a kid asking me to help with a bully. I didn’t think about why he asked me. It just wasn’t right, and he asked, so I helped. That pattern would repeat for the next forty years.

I grew up with a sister, Kathleen, who had special needs. That shaped me more than any degree ever would. I learned early what it meant to be with someone whose experience of the world was different from mine. I learned what it cost a family when things could go sideways at any moment. Special Olympics, 4-H, Boy Scouts, church service projects. Kathleen passed away, and her death was one of many encounters with loss that would quietly steer my life toward the questions most people avoid: what happens after this, and why are we here at all.

My mother was a nurse who came up in the post-Vietnam era. She taught me generosity. She also taught me, without meaning to, that helping should be free, that asking for something in return was somehow wrong. That lesson would follow me for decades, and eventually teach me about limiting beliefs and inner child work. Everything is connected you see.

I played college athletics. I studied politics, history, and philosophy. In 2001, I studied abroad at Assumption University in Bangkok and was living in a Muslim-majority neighborhood when September 11th happened. I watched the world fracture from the other side of it. I volunteered teaching English in that neighborhood, traveled around Southeast Asia, and came home knowing I wanted to do something that mattered.

Two years later, when the atmosphere was charged for a fight and many of my peers were joining the Marines, I joined the Peace Corps in Bangladesh. I want to be clear about something: this was not the safer choice. We were unarmed civilians with no one to protect us, and we had nothing but our ability to adapt and integrate into a culture that was not our own. Hartals, violent political riots that could erupt without warning and shut down entire cities. Natural disasters like tsunamis. A population that was not, at that moment, particularly fond of Americans. If you know anything about Bangladesh, you know it is a wild and dangerous place. I was on my own, in a country most people couldn’t find on a map, doing work that mattered to almost no one back home.

I served there from 2003 to 2005. We taught English, and the reason said everything about the world I was entering. During the 1971 war of independence, Pakistan had systematically murdered Bangladesh’s intellectuals: the teachers, professors, doctors, writers. The goal was to decapitate the country, and it nearly worked. The atrocity was so staggering that Ravi Shankar and George Harrison held the famous Concert for Bangladesh to force the world to look. Three decades later, the country still needed English speakers to participate in the global economy. That was our job.

I learned more about how the world actually works in that village than in any classroom. International aid, soft power, diplomacy, corruption. By the end of my tour, I wanted nothing to do with any of it.

I came home with one clear thought: I want to help people.

Medical school seemed logical. I applied. I couldn’t get in without years of prerequisites I’d never taken. I floated. Then my wonderful friend Vicki mentioned a counseling program she was in and thought I’d be good at it. Johns Hopkins had just launched a master’s program in counseling that was starting that summer. I could begin immediately. That mattered to me more than anything at the time.

So I started. I worked at Kennedy Krieger’s school for children with severe autism in Baltimore, which felt natural given my sister. I trained as a school counselor, which seemed safe and maybe even fun. Then one afternoon I was stamping report cards in a guidance office and I knew, with the kind of clarity that doesn’t negotiate, that I would suffocate inside that system. No disrespect to the people who do it well. It just wasn’t mine.

I graduated into the 2008 financial crisis. The safe government jobs vanished overnight. I tried financial services, which mostly meant being broke while trying to sell financial products to other people. If you want to know what imposter syndrome feels like in your bones, try that. A friend encouraged me to get licensed as a clinical professional counselor. I didn’t think I’d use it. I just figured if other people wanted the credential, maybe I should have it too.

Then my financial career collapsed, and someone I knew was working for a large outpatient mental health clinic in Baltimore. They did community-based counseling in the toughest neighborhoods: homes, schools, juvenile services. As a bigger guy and former rugby player, I was immediately in demand for the hardest cases. Trauma. Abuse. Kids the system had largely given up on.

I still didn’t call myself a therapist. I felt more like a teacher, sharing what I’d lived with young people who had questions about how to survive theirs.

I did that work for far longer than I probably should have.

It nearly destroyed me.

The burnout crept in slowly, then all at once. Compassion fatigue. Secondary trauma. I was getting roasted and didn’t realize how badly I was being burned, or what it was doing to the people closest to me. My marriage suffered. I developed my own patterns of numbing, ways of managing stress that I knew weren’t good but couldn’t seem to stop.

And then I went to a mindfulness training.

Meditation had been part of my life before, but this was different. Mindfulness didn’t just give me a technique. It gave me sight. For the first time, I could see the stress reactivity cycle with total clarity: why the patterns existed, how much I was carrying in my body, and a simple, radical truth. Seeing it clearly, with awareness, meant I now had the power to change it. If I chose to.

I chose to.

Mindfulness led to vipassana. Vipassana led to clinical hypnosis, past life work, the study of consciousness at levels I never expected to take seriously. Meditation opened me to a world beyond what the five physical senses can measure. Paranormal experiences I’d quietly had for years, visits from my deceased grandmother, moments I couldn’t explain, suddenly had a context. And as a therapist hearing other people’s stories in absolute confidence, I’d encountered far too many similar experiences to dismiss any of it.

Then there was the ferry.

During my Peace Corps service, I had to cross the Padma River regularly on overcrowded ferries. If you want to understand the danger, Google “Bangladesh ferry accidents.” On one crossing, a sudden storm hit without warning. The shallow-draft boat rocked violently side to side. Two hundred people, maybe more, all believing death was moments away. Women and children wailed inside the cabin. Men stood at the back of the boat smoking, chewing betel nut, staring at the water.

I studied the current and prepared to jump. We’d been trained that a sinking ferry creates suction, and if you don’t get clear, it pulls you under.

Time stopped. My life moved through my awareness. I thought about my parents and how devastated they would be. I felt gratitude for the life I’d had. I’d wanted adventure. I’d found it. I couldn’t complain. I found tremendous peace in that.

I worked up the courage to leap.

And then I heard the words: “Don’t jump. It is not your time.”

Not in my ears. Through my entire body.

I froze. Something beyond me had spoken directly to me. And I knew, with the kind of certainty that doesn’t require proof, that we would make it to shore.

We did.

I spent years processing that moment. My conclusion was simple: I have a purpose. There are lessons still to learn. We all do.

So here I am. A licensed clinical professional counselor with over 20 years of experience and training from Johns Hopkins. A certified MBSR instructor. A clinical hypnotherapist. A man who has been around enough death in one lifetime, his sister, his grandmother, the people he’s sat with in their darkest hours, that the question of what comes next stopped being philosophical a long time ago. It became personal.

I never planned any of this. I never set out to become a therapist, let alone one who talks about God on a ferry, manifestation, past lives, and the nervous system in the same conversation. But that is what twenty years of sitting with people in their most honest moments will do to you. It strips away everything that isn’t true.

This is where I write about what remains.

Not answers. Not a program. Just what I’ve lived, what I’ve witnessed, and what I’m still learning. If you’re someone who has accomplished a great deal on the outside but quietly suspects that something deeper is asking to be heard, you’re in the right place.

If something here resonates, there’s a reason.

Welcome. I’m James O’Neill.