133: Nothing to Fix: The Process of Unbecoming with Lacey Kelly

A Simple Therapy Podcast:

Honest Conversations on Therapy, Mental Health, Healing and Self-Growth.

In this episode of A Simple Therapy Podcast, Sindee Gozansky talks with Lacey Kelly, LCSW, therapist and author of The Process of Unbecoming: A Different Relationship to Being Human. Lacey didn’t arrive at this work from theory — she’d felt an existential ache since she was a kid and spent years working through self-help books, trainings, and her own therapy practice before landing on the question underneath all of it: what if the thing we keep trying to fix was never actually broken?

The two of them work through the core premise of Lacey’s book — that we’re all born whole and worthy, and that the patterns we hate about ourselves are evidence we once protected something valuable, not proof something’s wrong. They get into how adaptation and personality form together in childhood, why that makes our protections feel like identity, and why capacity isn’t a skill to build but something we already have and just lose access to. Lacey talks through how she brings this premise to clients who are deep in shame without invalidating what happened to them, why shame can actually be a doorway into feeling connected to other people, and what she tells clients who relapse and feel like they’re back at square one. Sindee and Lacey also get into something bigger — the loss of a shared “third” that used to hold some of this weight for us, and what’s filled that gap instead.

Lacey closes with a message for therapists and helpers specifically: watch for the urge to fix the person in front of you, because it quietly reinforces the very belief you’re trying to undo. Her bigger point lands simply — nothing is missing from you, and remembering that is the whole practice.

00:48 – Meet Lacey Kelly

04:18 – The Therapist as Eternal Seeker

06:46 – A Universal Belief in Brokenness

08:47 – How Adaptation Teaches Us to Forget Our Wholeness

13:12 – The Premise: You Are Born Worthy

17:17 – When Protection Becomes Identity

19:41 – Capacity Was Never Something to Build

26:53 – Shame as a Doorway Home

33:31 – Holding Multiple Truths at Once

38:26 – The Myth of the Finished Self

44:57 – For the Burned-Out Helper

50:27 – Where to Find Lacey