Hi, I’m Kate.
Maybe you know me as Waffle’s mom, a mental health advocate, that girl who cries and dork dances on Instagram, or as a psychiatric survivor who spent 20+ years in the mental health system, survived 21 psychiatric hospitalizations, and lived through everything from psychosis to PTSD to agoraphobia (and yep, wore adult diapers through exposure therapy—ask me about it sometime. Or not. Either way, I will tell you).
Either way, today, with my new team, I’m deeply honored to be here with you and thrilled to officially relaunch The Healing Lab.
Our hope here is simple: to create a community with real answers to the panicky question: How on earth are we going to survive this?
Not just for ourselves—but for one another.
What if healing isn’t what we think it is?
Let’s get real. Our systems of care are broken. The world is unraveling. And most of us are more dysregulated than ever — anxious, exhausted, numb, stuck, and sometimes straight up miserable. We are not this way because we aren’t trying. We are this way because the world feels broken right now, and the tools we have been given are not enough.
As a culture, we’ve come a long way in learning to validate our feelings. That matters. Truly. It saved me once, and I’ll never dispute or diminish the importance of soft sanctuaries, self compassion, and survival care.
But we can’t stop there.
Because if we stay only in comfort and its pursuit — if we keep confusing comfort felt in isolation for wellbeing — we risk building a cocoon, not a life. We risk getting stuck in cycles that look like healing but actually keep us small, isolated, and completely disconnected.
Now, I want to be honest with you here, always.
So, let me say this loud and colorful. I’ve been complicit in that. I’ve been completely complicit in that: I’ve posted the soothing things. The calm voice videos. The “you’re okay” messages. And I meant them.
I meant every single word. But now, I need to say more.
Because comfort without community is not recovery, safety without life in service of self AND others is not growth.
And if the long road I’ve traveled has taught me anything, it’s that true healing asks something harder—and more beautiful—of all of us.
It asks us to rewire. To get uncomfortable. To recognize the difference between danger and discomfort, and to lean into discomfort with all of our bravery, soul, and heart.
Yes, true healing builds nervous systems and stories of self that can bend and grow, that can do the brave work of exploring identity, finding meaning, and living on purpose, not just for the sake of survival.
And that – all of that – is what we’re exploring here.
In The Healing Lab, we’ll go deeper than wellness platitudes and TikTok therapy. We investigate how real change happens—through the body, through the brain, through the rewiring of what safety even means. We will learn to use safety as a tool, not a destination. And we will practice leaning into discomfort as a portal—not a punishment.
This is not about toxic grit or pulling yourself up by your bootstraps whatso(fucking)ever. It’s about building oases of safety within ourselves so we can stretch beyond them, return to them, and stretch again once more. It’s about reclaiming the full spectrum of our being, so we can thrive together, in actual community.
What you can expect here
The Healing Lab is much more than a newsletter—it’s an evolving practice of community care and we want to invite you to join us. As a community member, you’ll find:
💜 Radical Acceptance, Paired with Kind Curiosity
Here, there’s no wrong way to be human as long as you are honest and kind. Here you are accepted in all your colors and contradictions. And here, we support each other no matter what. This is a place to grow into ourselves for the sake of community and every thing we do – and don’t do – offers us insight into how we might do that in alignment. So truly, actually come as you are. Be all your colors. Goodness knows, I sure am.
🧰 Practical Guides, Tools & Experiments
Real, concrete tools and resources for building internal oases of safety, and experiments for growing your capacity to move through discomfort intentionally—so you can build a life rooted in integrity and purpose. These will all be sourced from the wide and ever-evolving number of therapeutic modalities that exist to help people navigate pain and hard times. Have things you want us to research and explore with you? Always share – we are in this together.
🔬 Deep Dives on the Science Behind Healing
We’ll dig into the real science behind why certain techniques are effective, what’s happening with your brain and body, and how you can find and use the right tools for you, to deepen your growth and healing.
🫶 Raw, Honest Human Stories from Kate and the Community
Healing is messy. So damn messy. So here, we share stories that don’t tie up healing in a neat bow. Ones that are unabashedly real about how hard it is to be human and how challenging it is to navigate healing in a time where rage, joy, grief, and the paradoxes of being alive abound.
🫂 Community Conversations
Spaces where you can share your own solidarity stories of healing and humanity. Opportunities to ask questions and engage with others who value kind curiosity over false certainty.
Supporting members also have full access to the complete Healing Lab archive:
Guides, Experiments & What Works. From background guides on the nervous system, the stress cycle, exposure therapy, to how-to-kits such as “Cold Plunging 101,” the Healing Lab offers deep reads on the science behind healing, and gentle how-tos on where to start next.
The Complete Unpublished Memoir, “Maura and Me”... so Far. This work tells the story of my journey through psych wards, fugue states, and how I was transformed by my best friend in the ward — leading to a future of freedom beyond hospital walls.
Dogs Are Medicine. A full archive of my experience with the healing power of the dogs, including (and most especially) Waffle and Tugboat, the two service dogs I trained.
If you’d find that these resources would help you in your own healing, and are unable to be a paid supporter at this time, just email hi@the-healing-lab.com, and we will add you, no questions asked. Healing should be accessible to all and I never want cost to be a barrier.
Why is the Healing Lab relaunching now? What’s changed?
First and foremost, I have a goddamn team, that’s what .... (LOL).
But in all seriousness (and my 101 false starts working solo aside), I’ve been writing The Healing Lab for a few years now — through ups and downs, setbacks, recoveries, and those in-between stretches where all I could offer was a short poem, dog photo, and deep breath.
Every artist, writer, and creator knows this treadmill. You want to serve your community, stay consistent, and keep showing up. But slowly, the work is too great and you stop being able to do it. And that’s what happened to me.
But I wasn’t just tired. I was also grieving. Stuck in the space between deep gratitude for the life I’ve built and heartbreak at how hard it still was to just survive. To just make it through each day.
For too long, I tried to hold that paradox alone and push onwards. But healing doesn’t happen under pressure. And it sure doesn’t happen alone.
Which is the real irony here. I started The Healing Lab because I believe healing is communal. I believe we must democratize access to all these resources so that we can come together.
And yet I’d been trying to do it all, alone from my bedroom.
So I acknowledged the truth: I need a team who can help carry this mission forward. (Which was terrifying. Because the last time I trusted a team, it shattered me. My worst fears came true.) So how do you get brave again? You find the people who get you. The ones who don’t ask you to shrink or hide your hurt.
And by some true miracle, I did…
And now, as a team, we enter the next chapter of The Healing Lab. And I finally believe we’re strong enough to build it—together.
So meet Amy, my new partner and Susan, our new advisor.
These two brilliant women who know firsthand the cost of a world obsessed with overwork and perfection. We bonded under the crushing weight of hustle culture—a culture that teaches us to measure our worth in productivity, then spits us out burned or broken.
Meet The Healing Lab Team
🔸Amy O’Leary (Partner, Human) is a veteran of journalism, media, and non-profits (The New York Times, This American Life, Upworthy, Headspace). She spent her career asking how we can create stories that bring people’s attention to the things that actually matter. She’s an executive-function beast and the adaptive anchor of her brilliant, neurodivergent family—bringing a creative, unapologetic toolkit for helping people create, without burning out. She brings clarity, spreadsheets, tools, joy, fun and a knack for editing, narrative structure, organization and information design that helps make complicated ideas accessible.
🔸 Susan Horrell (Advisor, Human) spent her career in relentless pursuit of meaningful impact at the intersection of innovation and human connection. She started in grassroots politics and ultimately to Silicon Valley, where she helped launch Causes on Facebook — an early experiment in digital organizing that attracted millions. But despite the promises of tech, she needed to understand direct impact. So she pivoted again, putting on scrubs as a frontline nurse, landing in the ICU and then the ER. Every shift revealed more of the systemic failures that left everyone stretched too thin. Determined to fight for greater change, she went on to earn her Master’s in Public Health from Harvard and lead partnerships for Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation, supporting the mental health of young people nationwide. Susan brings strategic clarity, fierce compassion, and a true passion to build systems that actually care for the people inside them.
🔸Kate Speer (Founder, Writer, Human) is a writer, speaker, and mental health advocate who’s survived 21 psychiatric hospitalizations, a decade of misdiagnosis-induced psychosis, memory loss, fugue states, adult diapers, and more moments of “I can’t (fucking) do this” than she can count. She was once told she’d never survive outside a locked psych ward. Today, she’s married, working alongside her two service dogs, and building a life—and body of work—rooted in honesty, meaning, and real joy. For five years, Kate served as CEO of The Dogist, where she grew it to five million followers. Now, she works with Harvard on public health campaigns and writes here at The Healing Lab with unabashed honesty, deep experience, embodied wisdom, and a strong belief that a good life is still possible—even when symptoms stay. She’s still anxious. Still healing. Still here. And if all we can do is take it one day at a time? She wants you to know – That’s always enough.
Join Our Community
When you subscribe to The Healing Lab, you’re not just signing up for a newsletter—you’re stepping into a community. One that believes there’s a better way to exist together: with honesty, with care, and without the crushing weight of perfection.
Your support helps us make this project sustainable—for ourselves, our team, and for you. It allows us to show up for you with consistency and care, and keep offering tools, stories, and questions that meet you in your real, messy life.
Free subscribers are always, always welcome. Paid subscriptions help us go deeper, stay longer, and build something that lasts. Both matter deeply.
There’s no single answer here, just us, breathing together.
If you know someone who’s overwhelmed, burned out, or quietly craving a different kind of community—send this their way. There’s room here.
Welcome back to The Healing Lab.
We’re so glad you’re here.
So glad, in fact, we want our to begin by listening to you.
Yes, you read that correctly.
We want to begin with you because we want to give you the gift you give me each week—to be seen in one’s truth and loved for it, not in spite of it.
So today, we listen. As you take your next brave step and share your truth so this space holds not just my story — but yours and ours collectively, too.
We have a simple, three question survey to hear what’s on your mind, what’s showing up in your life, and how we can hold space for it below.
💜 Share how we can hold space for you here with this simple survey 💜 (3 quick questions, no pressure, just lots of gratitude)
(If you were able, thank you so much for taking the time to do that. I know that was a lot AND your generosity and truth make this space what it is – a community — so please know our gratitude for you joining us in this is unmatched.)
Yes, we cannot wait to do this together. With you.
Wishing you a day,
Kindly,
Kate (and Amy and Susan)
I’m so excited about being part of this. As I commented a few weeks ago, I think “healing” is just another way of being human — everyone is healing from something all the time, although the triggers might change and different skills are appropriate a various moments, it never stops, only changes. That being said, along with caring for myself and this community, I hope to gain some insight on parenting an adult son who struggles as well.
Good stuff ahead!