About Erica Murphy

While taking a mental health leave from work in August 2020, I finally realized that the life I thought I’d always wanted — the master’s degree, the leadership role, the big salary, eight years of surviving New York City — wasn’t what I actually wanted.

I’d accomplished everything I thought I was supposed to. Everything I thought would make me happy and fulfilled. I had the job, the apartment, the nice salary, the fancy coffee order, the color-coded calendar full of things that were supposed to mean I’d made it.

So why did I feel like I couldn’t breathe?

Every morning, I’d wake up already anxious, feeling like I was behind before my feet even hit the floor. Already bargaining with myself about how many more months I could keep this up.

It took me a while to understand that it wasn’t just burnout I was experiencing (though yeah, there was a mountain of trauma in there, too). It was spiritual starvation. I was bored out of my fucking mind!

I was bored to death with my own performance — that quiet, soul-sucking, “is this it?” cocktail of guilt, resentment, stress, and obligation that slowly kills off your aliveness one checklist at a time.

Upon having this realization, I couldn’t unknow it. So I did what any responsible, overeducated woman having an existential crisis does….

Jk. I did the opposite of that. I burned it all down 😆

Packed my shit, drained my savings, and flew back home to New Orleans with no plan except no more of that shit.

I thought it would be a sabbatical. But it turned into a reckoning.

Because when the noise stopped, I had to sit with all the versions of me I’d built to survive — the one who chased gold stars, the one who performed competency, the one who thought control equaled safety.

The Way Forward, my therapy practice, was born from this.

I made the huge decision to stop working for other people and go into business for myself - even though I had NO business training whatsoever. Because I so deeply believed that therapy should and can feel just like having a conversation with a friend - except, you know, a friend who knows shit and the conversation is actually helpful. Which is how my practice, The Way Forward, was born in January of 2021. Because I felt called to put into the world the type and quality of therapy I would want to receive for myself and I believe others deserve as well. 

I wanted therapy that didn’t feel like a dentist appointment. I wanted to talk about the real stuff: ambition, shame, control, pleasure, the weird thrill of almost-failing, the grief of outgrowing your own life. I wanted to build a space where women like me could stop pouring their energy into being good - and start letting themselves feel alive.

I knew there were people out there who were sick of the rigid, performative version of therapy — the checkbox kind that makes it feel like homework. And I knew they were looking for what I was building: something raw, grounded, irreverent, and deeply human. Therapy that feels like a conversation with a friend who actually knows what the hell she’s talking about — and isn’t afraid to go there with you.

That’s what therapy with me is.

A rebellion. A reclamation. A homecoming.

The way back to the parts of ourselves we buried to survive — and the power we didn’t realize we’d exiled right along with them.

xx,

Erica M.