Tayllor’s Story

Family relationships can be tough, so when Tayllor moved back near her hometown and her family after college, she knew she would need support. Thanks to encouragement from her friends, she sought out therapy. Her counselor at Insight Counseling Centers met her with the warmth and kindness she needed to work through anxiety and enter a new chapter in her life.

Tayllor’s Story Transcript

I am 100% on the therapy and counseling training. I think that anyone can benefit from counseling, no matter what life stage you’re in. If you have family issues or if you have issues with transition, I think having someone in your life who you can speak to, someone who’s an advocate for you, who is on your team and has your best interest at heart but has zero connection to the people around you, is something that is incredibly special and helpful and healing.  

My name is Tayllor, and this is my story. 

So I was born and raised in Murfreesboro, not far from Nashville. Post high school, I moved to Knoxville and studied Hispanic studies and journalism at University of Tennessee. After graduating, I worked in an elementary school, I taught high school Spanish, and I worked at nonprofits. This is year four after college, and I’ve completely switched tables, and now I’m a real estate agent, and I sell real estate in Nashville. It’s been a wild journey getting to where I’m at here, which is partly why I sought counseling. 

I love to be outside, I love to hang out with people. I don’t know, I’m sure people know the Enneagram. I’m either a type 7 or a type 2, so I’m working on figuring out which one that is. But I love to be with people and love to be busy. 

I think the move and the job transition were really tough for me, and so I was struggling with the transition hardcore. I have a difficult relationship with my family in the sense that right when I graduated high school my parents got divorced. I have biological parents and then I have stepparents, and I had a lot of anxiety moving back to Nashville last year. The reason I moved is because I ended up dating somebody who lived in Nashville, and I wanted to consolidate my life.  

I have friends who have always been encouraging counseling at basically any stage of life. When I moved to Nashville, I knew I wanted to do faith-based counseling. Because I was having some financial insecurity by not having a stable job, I reached out to a few centers, and Insight got back to me. They were willing to meet me where I was at financially. 

I had literally written on my intake sheet, “I want to learn how to chill out,” because I was very high-strung, I was very anxious. I was at a point in my life where I had a lot of anxiety leaving the house because I always just had a lot of fear. I was like, “What happens when I get in my car? What if I’m driving and get hit by a truck?” There were thoughts that I had prior to joining counseling, with anxiety that I was like, “This is out of control. I needed to talk with somebody.” 

I ended up being matched with Amy, or placed with Amy. We met on a weekly basis at first. She walked me through my anxiety. She taught me anxiety tips. I’m a major external processor, so I need to verbally process a lot of my emotions, and I learned that with her. Since meeting with her, I feel like I’ve been given the tools to basically live my life with more control over my feelings and my anxiety. I learned how to talk through and recognize my emotions rather than letting them control me. 

Amy was immediately an easy person to talk to. She felt safe, she was calm. She was kind. I felt like every time I spoke, whether it was about something that felt ridiculous to me, she empathized with me, and she validated how I felt. 

Being back in the same town as my family was really difficult, and I felt like whenever you move anywhere, you tend to really miss the community you had before. One of my biggest struggles was feeling lonely and isolated, like I didn’t have a ton of deep friendships. Just having someone there to listen definitely decreased the loneliness. It made me feel known, and it helped me make it through a time in my life that was incredibly scary. 

Encouragement to anyone in my situation: seek out therapy, and pray, and be willing to put in work. And I promise healing will come.