Antoinette Goosby

PMHNP

For me, the two have never really been separate. The way I move through the world and the way I approach care with patients come from the same place — a belief that you can't think your way to healing. You have to feel it, and eventually, you have to live it in your body. I grew up as a dancer. And in dance, you learn early that the body holds things your mind hasn't caught up to yet — tension, grief, joy, memory. Long before I ever stepped into a clinical setting, I understood that the body is communicative. It tells the truth even when words don't. That's carried into how I practice. When I'm working with someone who has an eating disorder, I'm not just looking at what they're eating or not eating — I'm thinking about what their relationship with their body has been, what it's been through, and what it might need to feel safe again. Medication can be a meaningful part of that. So can therapy, movement, stillness, and being truly witnessed by another person. I also believe that healing isn't linear, and I don't hold myself to a standard of perfection in my own life either. I'm always learning — formally through my studies, but also just through paying attention to my own body, my own patterns. That humility, I think, makes me a better clinician. I'm not approaching patients as someone who has it all figured out. I'm someone who takes the work seriously and keeps showing up, for them and for myself.

Two books come to mind, and I think they tell a story together that explains a lot about how I approach my work. The first is Little Girls in Pretty Boxes by Joan Ryan. It's a non-fiction look at what the worlds of elite gymnastics and figure skating actually do to young girls — not just physically, but psychologically. What struck me most wasn't just the eating disorder piece, though that's significant. It was how these young girls learned to disconnect from their bodies entirely in order to perform. Their bodies became something to manage, to punish, to push past — not something to live in. As a dancer myself, that hit close to home. And it shows up constantly in my clinical work. So many of the people I treat have that same fundamental rupture — a long history of relating to their body as the enemy rather than as part of who they are. The second is Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker. It follows a family of twelve children, six of whom developed schizophrenia, and it's as much about the family system and the mental health system as it is about the illness itself. What stays with me is how long these children suffered without anyone having the language or the framework to understand what was happening to them — and how much damage that silence caused. I think about that a lot when I'm working with adolescents. By the time many of them get to me, they've already learned that their inner world isn't safe to talk about. Part of my job is just creating enough space that they can start to. Together, those two books capture something I believe deeply — that so much of what we call mental illness is really a response to environments that asked too much and gave too little. My job isn't to fix people. It's to help them find their way back to themselves.