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The Quiet I Forgot Was Mine — A Memoir by Erica Smalla
I am a therapist who went to pieces. This is the story of how I found my way back — and what I found when I got there.
What This Book Is
I didn't lose my mind. I lost my color.
That's the only way I know how to describe the nine months I spent inside depression. Not the dramatic kind they make movies about. Not the kind where you can't get out of bed and the world knows something is wrong. The kind where you keep showing up. You answer emails. You sit with clients. You smile at the right moments. And underneath all of it, there is nothing. A flatness so complete it starts to feel like the truth about you.
I am a therapist. I know the language of the inner world better than most people. I had spent years learning to help others find their way back to themselves — and still, when the darkness came for me, I did not recognize it at first. I thought I was just tired.
What I know now, on the other side of it: I had disconnected from my parts. The Self at my center — the one who is calm, curious, and capable of holding everything — had gone somewhere unreachable. And I stayed in that managed distance for nine months, keeping everything running on the outside while something essential had gone underground.
Coming back was not a dramatic cure. It was slower than that. More like a thaw. It came through therapy — my own, not the kind I give. It came through crystal baths and sacred movement and a painting I made that proved to me, undeniably, that something in me was still alive. It came through my wife, who watched the nine months from the inside and did not leave. And it came through a deepening of faith — not the institutional kind, but the direct, body-level knowing that something is here and the ground of things is not cold.
I wrote this book for the part of you that is tired. The part that has been holding everything together for so long it has forgotten what it feels like to be held. The part that keeps showing up, keeps performing, keeps managing — and wonders, in the quiet moments, if this is all there is.
It isn't. I promise you it isn't.
The depression was the movie. The awareness was the screen. I had spent nine months believing I was the movie.
About the Author
I'm Erica Smalla — a licensed therapist, Certified IFS practitioner, pastor's daughter, traveler, wife, and auntie of nine.
I grew up in a family where faith was real and present — in the particular quality of Sunday morning light, in voices rising together, in my father's hands when he prayed. I left North Carolina as a young woman with savings I had earned and a need to understand the world. I spent years in Bangladesh. I taught in Thailand for five years. I pressed my hands into ground that most people I grew up with had only seen in photographs, and I let those places press back.
I came home different. Fuller in some ways. More certain of some things, less certain of others. I built a therapy practice in the same city I grew up in — because I believe healing has something to do with coming home, and that is the work I want to do with people who are finding their way back to themselves.
I practice from my office in downtown Concord, NC, where the walls are purple and teal, there is a Pride flag above the bookshelf, and the sign on the door has always meant what it says: there is room here for all of you.
A portion of the proceeds from my work goes toward supporting Mma Pula in Botswana and toward the long-term vision of building an orphanage in Africa. This work has always been about more than the individual healing. It is about what we do with it once we find our way back.
The Book Is the Story. The Journals Are What You Do With It.
The memoir and the Living Frequency Chakra Activation Journal Series were made to go together. The book traces the nine-month depression and the long way back — the IFS parts work, the crystal baths, the faith that survived losing its container, the wife who stayed. The journals take that journey and put it in your hands.
Seven volumes. One per chakra. Each one a somatic practice, a sound frequency, a set of writing prompts, and a ritual designed to bring you home to yourself the way I had to find my way home. The book tells you what the path looked like for me. The journals are how you walk it for yourself.
Explore the Living Frequency Collection at Heartbeat Therapy.
Be the First to Know
The book is coming. It isn't published yet — but it will be, and when it is, I want you to be the first to hear it.
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