Dr. Holly Richmond on Why Healing Begins When We Stop Believing We're Broken

For Dr. Holly Richmond, becoming a sex therapist wasn't part of a carefully mapped-out career plan. In fact, she says her journey began with realizing she had been wrong. 

At the time, Holly had spent more than 15 years as a journalist covering beauty, health, fitness, and celebrity profiles. While the work looked glamorous from the outside, it had stopped feeling meaningful. She remembers receiving an assignment to write about a new lip gloss and thinking, If I have to write another article about lip gloss, I'm going to lose my mind. Around the same time, she began volunteering as a creative writing teacher at a girls' juvenile detention center in Los Angeles. Listening to young women write openly about experiences of sexual abuse, often with little visible emotion, changed her understanding of trauma and planted the seed for an entirely new career.

At home, she was also navigating the end of a sexless marriage and confronting difficult questions about intimacy, relationships, and her own patterns. Looking back, she admits she initially searched for explanations that placed the responsibility somewhere else before realizing she needed to understand herself more deeply, too. Pathologizing her partner and viewing herself as a helpless bystander was a convenient, one-sided solution to something that was a two-part equation. Not only did she need to understand herself more, she needed to make changes in order to be an ative, self-aware participant in her life.

That season of uncertainty ultimately led her back to school to study clinical psychology, specialize in sexual trauma, and earn a Ph.D. in Somatic Psychology, a field that explores the relationship between the mind and body. What began as a search for answers became a calling. Over years of working with clients, Holly has found that the struggles people bring into therapy often look very different on the surface but share a common thread underneath. Shame has a remarkable way of convincing us that we're the only one, the most broken, or somehow beyond repair. One of the most important lessons she's learned, both personally and professionally, is that healing often begins by replacing blame with understanding. 

"There's nothing wrong with you," she tells clients. "Something happened to you." 

That simple shift changes everything. Rather than seeing themselves as flawed, people begin to understand that many of their behaviors were adaptations that helped them survive difficult experiences. Those patterns may no longer serve them, but they once protected them. As Holly often reminds clients, psychotherapy isn't about becoming someone else. It's about developing enough self-awareness to understand why you became who you are and giving yourself permission to evolve from there. 

That philosophy extends far beyond therapy. In a culture that encourages us to optimize everything, from our sleep and relationships to our productivity and even our emotions, Holly believes we're quietly losing our ability to simply be present. Growth and self-improvement have their place, but she worries that constantly trying to fix ourselves keeps us disconnected from the experiences that actually shape us. Discomfort, awkwardness, boredom, and uncertainty aren't signs that something has gone wrong. They're often where resilience is built and where meaningful change begins. 

Her work with women has also deepened her understanding of a trauma response that rarely receives the attention it deserves: fawning. While most people are familiar with fight, flight, or freeze, fawning often shows up as people-pleasing, over-accommodating, and saying yes when we desperately want to say no. Holly describes it as "freeze with a smile on its face." For generations, this response has helped women stay safe, but over time it can disconnect us from our own needs. Learning to set boundaries, trust our instincts, and stop managing everyone else's comfort isn't selfish, she believes. It's one of the most powerful forms of healing. 

That naturally leads to another word Holly wishes women embraced more freely: pleasure. While much of her work centers on sexual wellbeing, she believes pleasure extends far beyond sex. It's about allowing ourselves to experience joy without guilt, asking for what we need without apology, and recognizing that our desires matter. She sees encouraging signs of change, especially among younger generations, but believes there's still work to do in creating a culture where women don't feel obligated to compromise themselves in order to keep the peace. 

Holly works to practice those lessons in her own life. Between raising two young boys, writing books, seeing clients, and leading retreats around the world, she intentionally creates moments that reconnect her with herself, whether that's sharing a beautiful meal, traveling somewhere new, or stepping away from work long enough to experience something purely because it brings her joy. Looking back, one belief surprises her more than any other: people are capable of far more change than they think. As she begins her next chapter, expanding her work with couples and writing her next book, that belief continues to guide everything she does. Healing isn't about becoming someone new. It's about letting go of the stories that convinced us we were never enough in the first place.