Dani

And I thought it was so cool.

So we fast forward two years.

I've recovered.

Things are fine.

I'm now at the end of my graduate school program.

I am no longer working as an assistant for the graduate school program, but I am interning because internship was a significant part of my grad program.

And the internship that I had at this point was for a nonprofit that provided individual and family therapy services for juveniles who were involved with the juvenile drug court system.

So I am a therapist.

I specialize in addiction and I specialize in trauma.

But at this point, I wasn't fully licensed.

I was just a little tiny baby intern.

I didn't know what the hell I was doing.

All of my clients were between the ages of 10 and 19.

Most of them were male.

And they had all been at one point in time incarcerated or involved with the law because of drug crimes.

And given where we were at that point in time, the primary substance was meth.

It was such a cool experience.

That was a really good internship for me.

But it wasn't what you think of typically when you imagine doing therapy as this very naive junior baby therapist because I wasn't in some plush office asking people about their mothers.

I was going to rehabs and I was going to halfway homes and I spent so much time in the youth correctional facility where I would sit there.