I have always loved the sound of cicadas. Growing up in Virginia, they were the soundtrack of my childhood. I hear them and am immediately transported back to swinging on the rope swing in the back yard of my childhood home or riding my bike through my old neighborhood on a humid afternoon or knowing that it was about time to go back to school when their nightly din began to fade.

Later, in North Carolina, I would play a weird, sort of “eye spy” game, with my children; we would wander through the tall longleaf pines looking for empty shells stuck to the bark of the trees, left behind by the cicadas that had “metamorphosed.” They had left their hard, constrictive shells behind, using their freshly formed and inflated wings to fly away into their new above-ground life. With their large, wide set eyes and gauzy wings, I thought they were beautiful, but it was their cyclical, rhythmic, humming I loved most – to me, a song of hope and change.

When I opened my Marriage and Family Therapy practice, I knew I would incorporate an allusion to cicadas somewhere. Why? Because when I think of therapy, I think of hope and change. I think of how therapy offers the opportunity to see ourselves in new ways.  Like the cicada, we shed our hard, constrictive shells – or the way we have always done things – to fly away into our new above-ground life – the life we yearn for that lets us be honest, authentic, and real. ~ Christin