Gdejoie Unveiled & Unapologetic

This is the **DRUMROLL** FIRST blog post of GDEJOIE ***whoohoo*** and I’m so excited and equally, admittedly, nervous to be here :D!!!! Allow me to introduce myself! My name is Gabrielle Renée Dejoie Smith. Dejoie is both my mom’s maiden name and my middle name. I have so much gratitude for her having the intuition to share her name with me. It is French and literally means ‘of’ ‘joy’.

I’m hoping this space can bring you tools, videos and products to unlock the joy within yourself.

By training I am a mental health therapist. I attended The University of Southern California and graduated with a BA in psychology. I worked as a research assistant to a professor in the School of Education during my time in undergrad. I continued my training at the University of Southern California’s School of Social Work and received my Masters in Social Work with a concentration in Mental Health. I have worked with women dealing with domestic violence, transitional aged youth, children, teens, inpatient adult psych with diagnoses ranging from depression and bipolar disorder to schizoaffective, and most recently, I was an Eating Disorder Therapist at an inpatient Eating Disorder program.

While I am trained as a therapist, as a **disclaimer** – I am NOT here to practice as a therapist and I am certainly not here to provide therapy. Therapy is, however, a wonderful tool and I strongly encourage each and every one who stumbles upon this page & post - to try therapy at some point in their lives. We can all use healing. We all need healing. Especially us Black and brown people. It's our duty and birthright to heal not only our pain, but also the pain we carry in our blood from our ancestors. More on the effects and implications of inter-generational trauma later, though! The point is... we can all certainly use help from time to time and an unbiased opened ear.

I AM here to bring you tools that I believe everyone, regardless of attending or having access to therapy, should learn and know. Tools that can help you heal yourself and move towards your best self and your best life.

I like to identify myself, today, as a Wellness Educator and an avid proponent of self-care because I am soooo into sharing skills, theories and tools to help others help themselves. I am a healer by profession and heart, but while I relate heavily to that term, I will say that healing cannot be forced upon you or bestowed upon you by someone else. You heal yourself, you have to put in the work, and you are the only one that is able to do so. I can hold space for you, however, and I can share with you a multitude of tools to help you on your journey.

I have known since I was about 12 years old that I wanted to “help people”. To many adults around me, this was"cute" since I hail from two clinical psychologist parents, both Ph.D.s that graduated from UC Berkley. I laugh sometimes thinking about how people would hear that and asked wide-eyed if it 'messed me up' to have two therapist as parents. I think to myself how it honestly messed me up to have two Sagittarius parents as a Cancer child. That being a snide joke for my astrologers and astro lovers.

I’m a Cancerian, which if you know anything about astrology, we are the mothers of the zodiac and labeled as just a tad bit emotional. I was generally the “jr therapist” to many of my friends and was always fascinated by how the mind works, people’s thoughts, and what made them do the things they did. In addition to this genuine curiosity about human behavior and being a total empath with initially poor boundaries, I have struggled with depression since I was a teenager. Although I, nor my parents labeled it as such back then, I realized in college during a depressive episode, what I had experienced as early as age 13 was major depressive disorder. I’ve struggled with “overthinking” for forever but I finally realized it as anxiety in my first year of grad school when I had my first mild panic attack. It felt like a large human was standing on my chest and it made it very hard to breathe or much focus on anything else and it didn’t go away for hours.

My knowledge comes from a mix of schooling, being a therapist, receiving my own personal therapy, independent research, listening to a lot of health podcast, and personal experience dealing with depression, anxiety, low-self esteem, disordered eating and in the last 8 years or so -- grief. Last year, 2018, was a doozy for me - as it was for so many of us. I spent 2017 struggling with potentially losing my mom to esophageal cancer. I spent the first part of 2018 merely surviving, watching my mom die, taking care of my mom while her spirit dwindled, and also showing up to my job as an eating disorder therapist to clients with co-morbid diagnoses and many of whom had suffered trauma. I was dealing with my own (little t) trauma but there I was being a therapist to others, until I stepped back to take care of my mom full time. My job helped me to keep going. It was a way to step out of the unbelievable nightmare that became my life to breathe, but it was also an added weight to continue working as long as i did during that time as my adult-ing responsibilities piled higher and my depression dug it’s heels in.

My mom transitioned on July 22, 2018 and I was left to pick up my broken pieces after losing the person who loved me most in this world. So the end of 2018 was me dissecting and integrating my own trauma and attempting to come back to myself. I'm still and as i realize now... will always be continually healing. And unlearning unhelpful habits and thought patterns, for that matter. 2018 was my lowest in a sense, but also, I look back on it and realized it was the most graceful and best I’ve handled any extreme low because I was blessed to have been through low lows before and had built up an arsenal of tools with which to protect my spirit and my sanity. The old me may not have made it through last year, if we are being completely honest. But having the tools and skills I plan to share with you made all the difference in me staying alive over the last two years and coming to a place where I feel I am thriving and so excited for life!

Having the tools to take care of myself – mind, body, and spirit, the tools to honor myself and my pain, knowing how to care for myself, knowing the questions to ask myself so I could feel my feelings, while still taking care of so many others was a life saver. Furthermore, having these tools helped me to get from a place of surviving into thriving. So here I am. Wanting to share these potentially life-saving skills with you. Skills I wish I had known or been taught back in high school. Skills I have taught clients since I was a grad student interning up until last year. Skills that we all should be taught and be aware of. Skills I am utilizing, stumbling through and mastering everyday, myself. Skills that are so simple you may roll your eyes but when you put them into practice you see your life changing before you.

My deepest desire and dharma (or purpose) is to help Black and brown women & femme-identifying people love themselves unapologetically, integrate the idea that they are enough, and gather tools they need to get through hell and back. Because we KNOW Black and brown women go through hell and back. Whether that hell is one’s environment or own mind or both, whether it is mental health or situational, black and brown women have always pushed through. We will continue to push through regardless, but I want to share tools to make that journey just a little less heavy and maybe a bit more enjoyable. While my focus is on individuals that identify as women or femme and are Black and Brown, I also want to create a space for all women of color and my men/masculine identifying people of color. Because the world is just harder when you have different intersectionalities going on. Men struggle with mental health, with self-doubt, with feelings and that's okay and completely normal, despite what you've heard. There are toxic expectations of what masculinity “should be”. And to improve the world, we need to look at what messages we are putting into the world about how we all “should be”. We have a lot of myths to dispel and a lot of tools to learn. So my intentions are as follows…

May we have a little more support along the journey and feel safe asking for that support from ourselves and others. May we receive a little more validation that what we feel is valid, that what we all go through—stumbling through life-- is hard AF. May we feel less alone and less shame for our mere existence. May we be vulnerable in order to shatter the shame around our very human experiences. May we be able to feel our feelings in a healthy way that honors our highest self. May we lighten our loads – emotionally, physically, and energetically so that we can create healthier physical bodies and lessen our chance of disease. May we have more tools to help us love ourselves, cherish our spirit and remember who we are while we are going through hell and journeying towards the light. May we use these tools to create healthier minds, bodies and spirits. And may we use these tools to create a better world and healthier mindsets for our Black and brown children.

I am so excited to start this journey with you.

- xo Gdejoie