There is often talk in the media about healing your inner child, but far less talk about healing your inner teenager. When it comes to my time in academia as a doctoral student, I have found attending to the wounds of my inner teenager has allowed me to experience something else that is seldom spoken about: healing during a PhD. 

For me, my teenage years were the years that solidified some painful stories I told about my self-worth and value, particularly around education. I often felt like I needed to provide ‘value’ to my peers by doing the most work on group assignments; I thought it would mean more people would like me or want to be my friend. I realised consciously about that time that the adults in my world were only interested in what I accomplished, what my grades were, and the topics I was learning about; I began internalising that what I was doing was more important than who I was being as what I was curious about or confused about. My entire interior world, including my mental health and wellbeing, was less of a topic of conversation than school. Grades mattered, and because I was encouraged for ‘my best’ to be the same as ‘the best’ (as in the actual highest score), I felt like I failed other people for not being the smartest or the top-performing student in the room.  

It was during this time where I was not supported in identifying feeling overwhelmed in my body. I was not supported in recognising sensory signals that I wasn’t doing well; I barely had my emotions reflected back to me. I was told to sleep more and eat better when I would get sick, not how to complete my stress cycle. My teenage years were not years of fostering self-confidence or self-esteem that was solid; rather there was praise for accomplishments and achievements in education that built a shaky foundation for my self-identity. As I moved through my teenage years in high school, teachers were beginning their negative self-talk toward us in our final years. They would say how unprepared we were for our undergraduate programs – how that kind of writing wouldn’t be tolerated by professors, how that kind of behaviour would create problems for us, how the hacks we thought we figured out would only set us up to be behind. I felt not good enough in the eyes of the adults who were supposed to be supporting me, whether that be disappointing my teachers, my parents, coaches, or other family members. I felt insecure, unconfident, and constantly seeking external validation to ‘reduce’ those feelings. 

Moving into Higher Education 

My undergraduate degree program did not give me much time to heal from the wounds of early teenagehood, as again I found myself in an environment of competition, where overachieving academically was celebrated and comparison to the trajectory of those around you in the same program or degree (sometimes even in an entirely different one) was constant. It was a period of time where I learned to push my body even more with late nights in the library, not eating when I was too anxious to keep food down, and hour-long study sessions with no breaks even when headaches creeped in, and my focus departed. I was operating from the old narratives of what was important: what I accomplished and not what it took to get me there. I had adopted the story that academic accomplishments were to happen by any means necessary. I was sick every term because of my sleep schedule and the way anxiety impacted my eating. Besides physical illness, this mindset also meant I didn’t always prioritize or put enough effort into the friendships, and my romantic relationship at the time, that mattered to me. I didn’t make time for my younger sisters in the ways I would have liked. I felt ashamed at my lack of ‘discipline’ or ‘motivation’ when I didn’t work through the weekends or made choices to have fun instead of study. I didn’t yet have the framing that breaks are important for my creativity, that the connection I receive within my meaningful relationships supported developing a more sustainable self-esteem, or the more I took care of my body – sleep schedule, eating, body movement – the better work I did and had a more enjoyable experience along the way. I wish I had known the adage then: when you feel better, you do better.   

Training to be a therapist for my master’s degree was an entirely different experience than my undergrad, and yet still not one where I feel like my inner teenager was able to heal in the academic space. Learning to become a therapist did not require exams at the end of term, I was not asked to memorise theorists, and there were not all-nighters required of me to accomplish the reflective writing assignments I did have, I maybe was able to acknowledge her stories and wounds clearly for the first time, to notice my desire to be the ‘best’ or that I was willing to ignore my body’s cues for movement or sleep in favour of completing the readings, but it hasn’t been until this PhD experience that I feel like I can shift the narratives I was told about myself and education.  

Finding a Way to Healing 

It’s been in the freedom to develop my research, set my own schedule, and accept invitations to powerful tables where I can push against some of the dominant narratives that created wounds within me that has allowed me access to this healing. People often consider healing to be a solitary or internal experience, but the healing here for me has happened in my ability to interact and respond differently. It is being able to assume a position of power, like supervising undergraduate dissertations, and model for them taking time off, asking after how they are taking care of themselves, and challenge them to follow their own interests rather than mine. It is being able to sit across from tenured professors and non-governmental organisation (NGO) leadership and not shy away from what I know to be true as a therapist even if it is not the same expertise as the most powerful people in the room. It is not only responding to others differently in public, but also how I respond to myself in private without shame and guilt and trusting my voice as valuable, too.

My PhD schedule allows me to work with my natural rhythms, including the way I need certain ways of working in certain seasons and even accommodate monthly cycles that impact my body. Teenage me was forced into predetermined schedules made by others, where how I felt each day wasn’t allowed to impact my work. Similarly, I was never allowed to ask for accommodations when my body was cramping, or I was sensory overloaded. My PhD has been a time where I can walk away from an unfinished to-do list at the end of an afternoon to nap because I’m nodding off at my desk. There’s no need to spend the hours staring at a screen with nothing getting done except prolonging my exhaustion. My PhD has been a time where I practise not being mean to myself in my head when I make that choice to nap and leave emails until tomorrow morning; where I celebrate my choice to care for myself and listen to my body rather than push through and feel disgusted along the way. Being able to care for myself in these ways has meant that I have developed a kindness in my self-talk that I never had as a teenager. The expectations I have of myself now because of that are of those of a human being (messy, sometimes wanting to quit, sometimes motivated, a being that gets sick and sad, impacted by the events in the world around me) and not those of a machine (unfeeling, robotic, and output focused).  

My PhD at Cambridge has granted me access to rooms where I can remind people that disappointment, anxiety, grief, fear, confusion, surprise, joy, pride, all show up in our professional lives. That there is space to be made for our humanity within our research projects and paper writing. We are not productivity machines – we are not machines period, and productivity is not an accurate value marker for ourselves. I do not have to treat myself that way anymore, and I get to model to people who likely, I suspect, carry similar wounds to me. I can meet people human-to-human, rather than framing things in terms of what value I can provide or what I might do to help that person. I do not have to lead with conversations about the work people are doing, but rather enter conversations about the person they are.  

I have sensory toys scattered around my desk when I need them, I bring colouring sheets and an entire pencil pouch of beautiful pens to meetings, I work from bed when I need to, I set my boundaries with people who have more power than me because my humanity matters more than their position, I eat the foods that my body finds joy in, I buy the stationary that makes me feel cosy and aesthetic because my process is mine and I know it helps. I get to heal, in small choices and big choices, the harmful narratives that came from education systems. Finally, I can support my teenage self in the way I wasn’t able to at the time.  

Conclusion 

As I am slowly nearing the submission of my thesis, I consider all the factors and choices that have led me to have the healing experience within academia. Before I sent in my application, I intentionally sat down and wrote a list of non-negotiables for my PhD. I was not going to apply and continue to perpetuate the internalised harmful stories of my education’s past; I trusted myself to do this differently if I got the opportunity to do this research. The list included but was not limited to: two days off per week (they don’t always end up being Saturday and Sunday, but two each week), all eight weeks of my leave is taken throughout the year (there is no prize for overworking), I would go to therapy when I was stuck on my own, and I would be honest with my supervisor about what I need to be successful (which too some additional reflection to untangle my definition of successful and actionable steps).

It would be disingenuous to not acknowledge the immense amount of privilege that I hold to have this type of experience: that I am able to construct a research project of my own curiosities, I have a built-in community in my research centre, that I had therapy previously that helped me learn language to articulate what I need and how to handle confrontation, that I could access a student visa and the visa allows me access to a national healthcare service for when I am sick and there’s a pandemic happening, that I am at a university that subsidies some therapy sessions for students, that I can publish because I want to and not out of scarcity. I don’t think that all these things need to line up or happen this way to find healing along the way in a PhD, but within my story, these are some of the ingredients that have helped me. Some ideas for educators and universities include and may help others:  

• Providing resources for interviewing PhD applicants that provide them language for questions to ask a potential supervisor to see how they might be prepared to support their mental health and wellbeing throughout a PhD
• Providing living wages for people to be able to focus on their research/studies
• Preparing supervisors to discuss a variety of options for how they can provide feedback in a way that supports building confidence and curiosity within supervisees
• Encouraging connections across PhDs (as so many of the resources and confidence to be creative in my journey has come from other PhDs)

To continue with a food analogy: the ingredients in one way or another are reckoning with a larger recipe to make academia more human-centred. A not-so-distant future academia: one that encourages emotions to be shared, supports the wide range of ways people work and produce outputs, is celebratory of rest and breaks as much as a paper being published, where these old narratives of harm that I and other PhDs come in with can be acknowledged and addressed.     

Sydney is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge at the Centre for Research on Play in Education, Development, and Learning (PEDAL). She previously received her Master’s in Psychology at Seattle University, Bachelor’s in Science at Michigan State University, and completed a play therapy certificate at Antioch University Seattle. Sydney has also worked as a therapist with children, young people, and families in both a community agency setting and private group practice. Her doctoral research explores different intersections of play therapy, trauma, and exclude perspectives such as children’s voices in their mental health care, and play therapists’ voices in research.

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