I want to share with you some of the incredible people who have been a part of my life. I want to tell you about the heroes and heroines who under the worst of circumstances pulled themselves up. Some not all the way up. And some graduated this chapter of psycho-therapy.

I won’t reveal anybody’s identity. I will only share the gratitude I feel for having known these heroes and heroines.

We often think our dramas are unique to us, but we’re all the same.

During my 18 years of practicing psycho-therapy, I’ve seen miracles.

I’ve also seen people who’ve chosen to stay impoverished in their thinking and behavior.

One woman comes to mind. I’ll call her Barbara.

She came into my office a decade ago. She was lifted by somebody and dropped on my couch 40 minutes after the session was supposed to begin. She was too drunk to make it to her appointment on time.

In her mid-thirties, she was the spoiled daughter of a mogul. She had never had to work for anything. She was the sister of a brilliant brother. She was the unpopular child. She was the failing student. She was the drug addict.

She felt invisible to her family.

She had many different compulsive disorders. She was my first clutterer. She horded anything she could get her hands on, mostly clothes.

After about two years of therapy, she agreed that I could go with her to an apartment her father had rented for her. It was a two-bedroom apartment, average sized, with six closets full of clothes, shoes, make-up. Most had the tags still on.

She wore the same outfit every day — black leggings and a stinky sweater.

When I got to her apartment, I couldn’t see the floor. I didn’t know if it was carpet or tile. It was a foyer filled with belts, used tampons, hair brushes, Lean Cuisine meals, mostly uneaten, cat litter, furballs, newspapers.

She cried as she often did.

She drank and often reeked of alcohol.

She pitied herself. She wallowed in her self-pity.

She never recognized what she had. She always sought what she didn’t.

Barbara was missing a soul.

Barbara ended up a tragedy after several rehabs and her father flying in on his private jet and walking into my office unannounced whether there was a client there or not. I remember that his demands and her guilt at not being able to perform created so much tension that there were multiple attempts at suicide, both consciously and unconsciously. Her last attempt was at a bar where she drank herself into a tremendous stupor. She then got into a car and drove. She crashed into a store window and ran down a woman who was the mother of five children and put her into a coma.

A decade later, I don’t know what happened to Barbara. I know her father replaced her car with another one quickly so she wouldn’t have to be without.

This type of narcissism, this self-obsession coupled with self-loathing, equals a dangerous person.

I remember this supermodel who adorned the covers of dozens of magazines. She came to my office after a domestic dispute. She was the perpetrator. She had thrown a brick on her lover’s head and split it open.

He was an agent in Hollywood. He told her that before this story hits the press, she might want to get some counseling. That was his demand of her.

She talked to me about how she felt like a hanger for clothing and that nobody saw her essence. She was an ugly duckling as a child who grew up into a beautiful swan but she still felt like an ugly duckling inside. She could only focus on what she didn’t have.

She traveled from continent to continent wearing the world’s most exclusive clothes, hanging out with the most interesting men, yet she did not have a soul.

Early in my career, the words “hole in the soul” became a trademark of mine. I was struck by how people kept trying to fill the hole in the soul with sex or drugs or alcohol or gambling other forms of excess, anything that takes their mind off the pain.

Sometimes the hole in the soul sucks us in to the dark deep places of depression and hiding.

In therapy, many of my clients looked at how they could touch their soul, how they could plant seeds that they could water and watch grow into beautiful flowers.

Sometimes people come into my office with pictures of themselves as children. They wanted to show me how innocent they were and how life has hardened them.

There’s one person I’m thinking of who by the age of three was already being molested by her stepfather. I saw her at age 43 after years of molestation by different people in the family, up through age 17.

When the pain was so great, she would sit and doodle these numbers: “3, 5, 8, 11, 15, 16, 17.”

Those were the ages when she was abused.

She was referred to the office by an in-patient hospital program where she’d spent the past three months trying to recover her balance. She’d been self-abusive. She’d been a cutter. Sometimes anorexic. Sometimes a compulsive over-eater.

She had one friend, two cats, a sister, some nieces, and parents she chose not to see.

She was struggling to find a branch to hold on to to make life worth it. She didn’t think it was worth it three months before when she severed her arm in 257 places.

She used to keep a pocket knife in her jacket in case she needed to cut again.

She and I had to establish some rules. First, a suicide contract. Second, no cutting.

I asked for the knife one day and intentionally sliced my arm. I wanted to see what she felt.

My arm started bleeding. She started crying. “Oh my G-d, what did you do? You’re good. You don’t have to bleed the bad out.”

I looked at my arm. I looked at the blood. I bandaged myself up. And something miraculous happened between the two of us. I joined her world.

There was a time early in my practice when I thought I could save everyone.  I didn’t know how strong I was, or what I was made of, but I knew I had something that compelled me to want to help others.

I didn’t realize that I was trying to be a crutch for others. Today, many years later, I’m helping my patients to be their own source of energy and strength. Over the years, I’ve learned that I have limited strength. My ego has been humbled. I can not save the world and I can not save all the people in it who are hurting.

This was an important piece of my own therapy — to know my limits.