Welcome to The Healing Lab, a community project dedicated to exploring the vast and varied ways that humans navigate hard times and emotional suffering.
At its core, The Healing Lab honors this one simple truth:
It is hard to be human, and there is no wrong way to do so as long as you are honest and kind.
Here, we aim to explore and investigate the myriad ways humans of all kinds survive and reconnect with themselves, their bodies, and the world around them during hard times. We explore one area of focus a month, and each week, an experiment is offered to engage with that focus on your own terms.
This project is not about eradicating feelings or suppressing them. Instead, it is about honoring them and learning to harness their wisdom on purpose. It is about meeting them in their truth and discomfort, and finding what works for us, so that we can move forward with intention through the hardships of our lives.
Given the state of the world, we will first explore nervous system regulation as a tool for survival and protest. We will then move on to learning about additional techniques and modalities – somatic, holistic, therapeutic, and biomedical – to empower our understanding and agency about the many different ways that humans can navigate stress, emotional pain, and suffering.
In addition to these explorations and experiments, we will meet weekly to share and discuss our experiences. After all, contrary to what social media and pop psychology imply, true healing is about reclaiming ourselves in community for the sake of community, not in the absence of it.
My hope with this project is simple – to create what I didn’t have for the past two decades as I weathered major depressive disorder, suicidality, psychosis, PTSD, dissociative fugue, a slew of misdiagnoses and 21 psychiatric ward stays — an answer to the panicky question that forever rose in my chest: How on earth am I going to survive this?
Though I fully recognize that these experiments and learnings will never fix the broken systems we currently live in and face on a daily basis, it is my hope that some of these techniques can offer us respite and refuge within ourselves so that one day soon, or maybe even this very afternoon, we can come together as a community and tackle these injustices once and for all.
Now, I want to make some things very clear: Although the information shared here is always rooted in evidence-based science, this project is not a replacement for therapy or medical treatment in any way. This project is also entirely agnostic. It is not here to prioritize, prescribe, or pressure you into doing anything or tell you the right next step about how to manage your pain. That is a decision for you and your doctor to decide together.
Instead, this project aims to amplify the many different paths you can take through pain and empower you to make an informed decision about which paths you choose to take, all the while reminding you that everyone walks a different path in their healing — each as valid, varied, and beautiful as the next.
So, if you, like me, are searching for different ways to weather heartbreak and hard times, darkness and fear, and the overwhelming experience of being a deeply feeling human being on earth, The Healing Lab is a project for you.
And do know — whether you join me or not, your resilience is as innate as your breath. And although I would never presume to get your fight, from my own trenches, I see you in it and wholeheartedly believe in us both.
Kindly,
Kate
Each week, The Healing Lab offers:
A Weekly Experiment
A practice designed to support your nervous system and explore healing. Experiments might include somatic experiencing, breathwork, vagus nerve activation, grounding techniques, or fear-facing exercises. These practices honor both individual healing and the importance of community connection — because co-regulation is just as vital as self-regulation.A Reflection Prompt
Thoughtful prompts to help you tune into your body, mind, and emotions. These prompts invite self-awareness and introspection, helping you notice how the week’s practice resonates with your unique experience.Additional Reading
Links to articles, personal essays, and scientific literature that pertain to the week’s experiment. Sometimes, that might include a vulnerable story from yours truly, reflecting on my own experience. Other times, this might include a personal essay, poem, or article relating to the healing experience. The goal of this section is to remind us all that healing isn’t linear — it’s personal, imperfect, and deeply human.
Paid subscribers make my work and this free resource possible.
In addition to underwriting the project, monthly paid subscribers will also receive:
Healing Out Loud
Healing Out Loud is a gathering where we share our writing, art, and experiences with the monthly experiments. It is a place to find solidarity in the messy magic of healing. Healing Out Loud is hosted on Zoom. Everyone is welcome to share their stories though no one is required to share or even be on video during the session.One edition of long-form content that explores the month’s focus or my past experiences in the broken mental health care system
This will be a podcast episode, guest essay, or interview about how the individual navigates their own healing experience, especially during these recent hard times.Access to the archives
Maura and Me — the memoir I serialized and wrote here over the course of the last year
Dogs are Medicine — personal essays about the dogs I’ve met and the healing they have so generously given me
Lines — my version of poetry — that explore recovery, resilience, and self-reclamation in a body and mind that society deems unacceptable
About the Author
Hi, I’m Kate. I’m a writer, speaker, storyteller, mental health activist, and public health strategist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. I’m also a dog mom/service handler, absolute goofball, enthusiastic leisure athlete, avid dork dancer, and daily cold plunger. My dogs are my children, and thankfully, my parents have three nephews, so please don’t ask me if I’m going to have kids for their sakes the next time you see me at the deli counter. All good there.
I am also a born and raised Vermonter and still live here to this day with my wonderful, environmental scientist nerd of a husband and our two pups – Waffle (Bernese Mountain Dog, 10 y/o) and Tugboat (English Labrador, 4 y/o).
As I sit here, free and well(ish) on solid ground eleven years after I was told I would only survive my health condition in a locked ward, I have to say – Wow. What a gift to be here with them, and now, you too.
The idea for this project was first born on the pages of my journal. I was in the psychiatric ward for the third or fourth time (if only I dated those darn pages). I was hallucinating, struggling with thoughts of suicide and self-harm, and paralyzed by fear that I would never get better.
I was also deeply confused. Everywhere I turned — my doctors, the research, my family — I was told that therapy and my medication would help me feel better. And yet, even as I practiced every therapeutic lesson with discipline and took every medication exactly as it had been prescribed, I kept feeling worse.
Around this time, as I weathered my fifth year of treatment and the worst year of mental health symptoms I’d experienced to date, I became convinced that the way we thought about mental health and mental illness was not wholly accurate and the ways the doctors discussed me and my condition with words like — “fix,” “eliminate,” and "eradicate" — were born out of a need to control me and my symptoms instead of honor me and my true needs. At the time, these thoughts were chalked up to manic-induced paranoia, and I did my best to hide them thereafter for fear I would be sent to a locked unit for a 90-day hold. But nevertheless, I still wrote about this belief at length. After a particularly tough care team meeting, I scribbled these words:
But what if my pain is my teacher?
What if my pain is speaking my truth?
What if silencing my pain is eradicating me and not it?
Beneath those questions, to cope with being caged in a locked unit, I scribbled a whole slew of dreams. Some were undoubtedly a bit out there. I will never marry Legolas from The Lord of the Rings, after all. But others were quite thoughtful and astute.
One such dream was the healing lab — a place where I could find all the different ways that humans move through emotional pain — a place where health insurance didn’t dictate the next right step — and instead, I did.
This dream, scribbled in (oh-so-kate) hot-pink pen glory, recognized the limitations of the modern mental health care system and its for-profit model. It also questioned the heavy use of medication and held a powerful acknowledgment of the lesson the many people I had met in psychiatric wards had taught me: Everyone walks a different path in their healing. And that path — more than anything — is about building community.
So now, I’m finally honoring that dream and building this out.
I never imagined having even 500 readers, so to be here with over 10,000 of you after serializing my first memoir, Maura and Me — well, it is still quite literally unfathomable to me.
So, one more time, in case you really didn’t get it: What a gift to be here with you.
Kindly,
Kate
A little addendum:
Please know, whether you choose to stay or not, I am so grateful that you are here with me now.
Just by being here and reading my words as I live outside a locked psychiatric ward, you have already helped make my wildest dreams come true. Because today, I am not only a writer who is free on the page — I am free in life as well.
And with that, just as I said in the ward and every day since, I wish you a day.
Because a day, just like you, is always enough.
Kindly,
Kate
