"It's me, but it's not me"

“It’s me, but it’s not me”. This concept, distilled from David Eagleman’s Incognito, Chapter One: “There’s Someone in My Head, But It’s Not Me.” It speaks to the multitudes within us. It’s not a psychotic claim but an acknowledgment that we’re built from many parts and processes.

While I plan to dive deeper into the different approaches to the "Multitudes" in future posts, I want to focus now on the journey that led me to my current roles in counseling, coaching, and consulting.

Growing up, my dream was to be an astronomer; I was captivated by celestial objects. By age 13, Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time was my favorite book. My passion for quantum physics led me to an undergraduate internship at a neutron reactor center. So, how did I ultimately land in a Ph.D. program for Computational and Integrative Biology?

While an interdisciplinary research project certainly helped spark the interest, putting my therapist hat on, the real reason is simple: I get easily bored, and I want to know more—if not all of it.

If I were assessed in my younger days, I likely would have collected a handful of trending diagnoses: ADHD, autism, ODD, and so on. I was incredibly forgetful, often telling my mom I "didn't see" the questions I missed on tests. I was prone to physical fights and defiance—I once grabbed a teacher’s stick and threw it out the window when they tried to discipline me with that. Simultaneously, I was athletic, quick-witted, popular, and successful in my academic pursuits.

My personal history is why I tend to refrain from applying specific diagnoses to clients unless required for insurance or coordinated care. Don't misunderstand: I am not suggesting those challenges are not real. It’s simply that labels and diagnoses are too often utilized as shortcuts—too quick to generalize, categorize, and prescribe, when what most of us need is a more nuanced, human-scale understanding.

I’ve also lived through a lot of trauma growing up—but before you hold your breath, hear me out. A common misconception is that trauma must be dramatic or catastrophic: a car accident, abuse, or death. While I certainly experienced major events that fit that definition, I want you to reconsider what the word truly means.

The truth is, anything can be traumatic by an individual's own definition. If an experience stirs emotions strong enough for your brain to document and alter its circuitry, that is trauma. This could be a peer's weird look or a stranger's harsh comment to a child robbing you of a toy in daycare.

I was raised an only child in a family with generations of doctors, including 9 generations of Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioners, followed by an internal medicine physician grandfather, a neurosurgeon father, and an OB&GYN surgeon mother, her side of the family is mostly engineers and entrepreneurs. I’m not sharing this to boast, but to underscore a simple truth: the ignorance of mental health applies indiscriminately to all. Our education and social status offered no immunity to this blind spot.

The same blind spot applies to parenting—the only job in the world that requires zero previous experience or certification. We live in a world made of first-time parents and first-time children. How wonderful, and how inherently chaotic! That subject is certainly worth its own post, or a book on second thought.

When my neurosurgeon father began having panic attacks that prevented him from operating, my OB&GYN surgeon mother responded with what she knew best: a scalpel, oops my mistake, pharmacology. She quickly gathered a pile of psychiatric drugs to treat the anxiety and depression stemming from his situation.

What followed was a bizarre scene: She would rush him to swallow the pills, lay him down, then begin frantically pacing back and forth next to him. Every five minutes, she would check her watch, monitor his vitals, and ask if he felt better—which, by her medical standard, he should have felt already, given the time it takes for a drug to cross the blood-brain barrier. (My mother didn't literally pace the room every five minutes, but the underlying philosophy and expectation were identical.) You can't entirely blame her; there's a running joke in the field that surgeons are terrible at managing medications, after all. However, the true irony was stunning: two specialized surgeons, utterly helpless in the face of an emotional crisis they couldn't excise or chemically stabilize. That realization became the most important lesson of my life.

And you’re absolutely right—that’s how I found my way into this line of work. It’s tempting to joke that I’d make a fortune if I could bill all the surgeons who need help. In reality, I’d go bankrupt; few surgeons will ever admit to having a problem.

The desire to help my parents ultimately drew me toward psychology. This fascination deepened even as I spent endless days in the "dungeon" of the wet labs, repeating hours of PCRs, working from six in the morning until nine at night, and riving icy roads against “shelter-in-place” snowstorm warnings to check my bacterial strains, and watching my own mental and physical health dissolve into pipettes, Petri dishes, tubes, and centrifuges. This struggle prompted me to seek therapy, a profoundly positive experience that truly expanded my horizon.

Psychology is no "soft science." If you're willing to look closely, it sits at the tip of the scientific pyramid, built upon every other discipline. At its base are math, physics, chemistry, and biology, rising into subjects like anthropology, physiology, and cognitive neuroscience. statistics, chaos theory, linguistics—woven together into this beautiful mesh we call behavioral science.

Now that you know my story and the diverse "multitudes" that have shaped me, I hope it sparks a reflection in you. Use your own unique experiences—no matter how varied—to explore the complexity you're made of. I believe there's something new and fascinating waiting for you to discover within your own journey.