Michelle McCarthy, Licensed Clinical Mental Health Counselor/Supervisor

06/10/2026

We often/expect healing to be a straight line toward relief. But in reality, it often begins with a breaking.

When your trauma first happened, your body did what it had to do to keep you alive. It shut down, numbed out, stored the pain away. It didn't have the capacity to feel it all back then.

In healing, that capacity starts to grow.

And suddenly, the grief, rage, and longing that were locked away start to move through you. This can feel like falling apart, but it's actually your nervous system doing what it couldn't do before: processing what's authentic without collapsing.

Messy doesn't mean wrong. Overwhelming doesn't mean you're going backward.

It often means your body now has more capacity to hold what was once unholdable.

If you're in this part of your healing right now, where the old patterns are cracking and the feelings are raw, you don't have to walk through it alone. – .trauma.educator
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If you’re a recovering survivor of CPTSD and ready to connect with a community of co-survivors who are learning to safely reconnect with themselves, rebuild self-worth, and experience healthy, nurturing relationships, your journey toward healing and wholeness begins here.

Join us today and embrace the support you truly deserve.

Learn more at cptsdfoundation.org/dailyrecoverysupport

06/10/2026

06/10/2026

My therapist looked at me and said:
"You're not an overthinker. You're someone who never felt safe enough to stop thinking."
I didn't say anything for a long time. –

06/09/2026

Every therapist in this country who takes any insurance awakened to this reality today.

CAQH was a non profit that kept records on all of us for insurers to access- our licenses. Our insurance. Lawsuits. Hours.

As of today it is a profit operation run by United (no) Healthcare. It will be the decider of if you will find a therapist or be funneled into a tech owned company that owns therapists and chews them up and spits them out. ALL the insurers are in on this.

You will.not be referred to someone local. Not to a practice where the staff know who has the skills you need.

Nope. Headway. Alma. The others. The ones who SELL your information before you sign client agreements.

Be careful. Please. Look locally and find someone with an address. And a local number. Because those companies also create fake therapist pages that will refer you back to them.

"We have a big problem
For those who may have missed it, CAQH has been rebranded as DataSpring. I am including some information about the implication of this change, which was shared by an advocacy group, Mental Health Professionals Equity Alliance (MHPEA)

CAQH just rebranded as DataSpring.

What does that mean?

Here’s what actually happened, and why it should alarm every therapist, counselor, and independent provider in this country.

CAQH has existed since 1998 as a nonprofit. Health plans had governance roles through membership, but there was no ownership, no shareholder structure, no fiduciary stake. It functioned as an industry utility. Imperfect, payer-influenced, but nominally neutral.

That ended on January 6, 2026.

CAQH is now formally owned by twelve shareholder companies representing UnitedHealth Group, Cigna, Aetna, Elevance Health, Humana, and a coalition of Blue Cross Blue Shield plans. The board chair is a UnitedHealth Group executive. Every seat at the governance table belongs to a major commercial payer. This is not membership. This is ownership.
Five months later, today, it rebranded as DataSpring.

So why does this matter? Ask yourself why the largest insurance companies in the country would invest in and take formal ownership of a platform that collects data on every provider who bills insurance.

CAQH is not just a credentialing database. It is the mandatory infrastructure that sits upstream of:
✦ Every provider enrollment decision
✦ Every network participation determination
✦ Every directory listing that patients use to find you
✦ Every credentialing process

Owning that platform means owning the chokepoint. It means first access to intelligence on providers across 4.8 million provider records.

For payers already investing in vertically consolidated platforms like Headway and Alma, ownership of the upstream credentialing infrastructure is not a coincidence. It is a strategy.

We have spent years documenting how administrative burden is used as a weapon against independent providers. These are not accidents of a broken system. They are features of a system now owned by the entities who benefit from them.

The nonprofit fiction is gone. The conflict of interest is now structural and on the record.

State insurance commissioners, advocates, and task forces working on MHPAEA enforcement and provider directory accountability need to be asking: can we mandate reliance on a system of record that is owned by the parties we are trying to regulate?

Share this. The behavioral health workforce pipeline is already under attack from every direction. Providers deserve to know who just bought the gate."

Copied & pasted.

05/22/2026

Reminders we all need sometimes, when healing starts to feel like fixing and our humanness starts to feel like a flaw.

Your responses, your emotions, your needs are all part of the beautiful ecosystem that makes you human. Not everything needs to be healed, not everything needs to be fixed, and not everything needs to be shifted out of. Sometimes it just needs to be met, held, and seen. –

04/30/2026

Fathers play an incredibly important role not just in how they treat their children, but how they treat their children’s mother.

If he is patient, if he asks for her input, if he apologizes when he acts out of character, his children learn love is safe. They will show this level of respect and care to their future partners.

Of course, not all marriages last. And even when they don’t, can he model respect? How does he speak of her? Is he civil? Does he put his own hurt feelings aside understanding she is the most important person in his child’s world.

When children grow up in homes where a father shows toxic love, they don’t blame them. They blame themselves. When they watch him put down their mother, it’s a psycho-spiritual injury. They are a part of her. And if she’s “bad” or “wrong,” they are too.

A father who loves their mother well builds resilience, regulation, and self esteem in his children. He sets them up to see the world as a safe, good place. He reduces their risk of being in an abusive relationship by over 50%.

He teaches them that the woman who brought them into the world is inherently good, and so are they.

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04/30/2026

We want things to be good. We want things to be right. We want security, sanity, and a steadiness to life. But when stability depends on us getting it right all the time and pretending everything is fine, then that’s not true peace. That’s control.

04/30/2026