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For the Chronically Ill Community

The chronic illness journey is complex. You don’t have to navigate it alone.

So you’re already in therapy, but you’re looking for additional chronic illness support?

Welcome to the Waiting Room

is a community membership for people living with chronic illness — a space for conversation, reflection, and shared understanding with others who truly get it. Open to anyone, anywhere. Not therapy. No clinical relationship, but very real connection and insight. This is for people who want to feel less alone in it all.

Come sit with us - we're in the waiting room

You've learned more about your condition than most doctors in your chart. You've fought for diagnoses, translated your own test results, and advocated for yourself in rooms where you weren't believed.

Most support out there tells you to think positively, push through, or try harder.

This isn't that.

Welcome to the Waiting Room is a place to put some of that weight down — where you don't have to explain yourself to be understood, and you gain evidence-based, non-gaslighting tools for:

  • advocacy scripts for work and relationships

  • acceptance and somatic practices for understanding your body instead of fighting it

  • and workshops on fear, masking, identity, and how chronic illness shapes the way you move through the world.

A woman with long brown hair and glasses is standing outdoors on a porch, looking at her smartphone, with a white brick wall and green bushes in the background.
Come sit with us - we're in the waiting room

What’s Inside?

Workshops

Live workshops with other mental health and licensed medical professionals to answer your most important questions about living with and managing a chronic illness.

Live Support Groups

Deep dive into client-centered, evidence-informed chronic illness care through therapy trainings.

Worksheets

Expand your expertise while earning credits.

Somatic Awareness

Reflect, strategize, and problem-solve with peers and mentors.

Conferences

Learn from and connect with a community of specialists in chronic illness care.

No more googling "how to make doctors believe you" at 2AM. No more apologizing for your needs. No more isolation.

How Do You Know "Welcome to the Waiting Room" Is Right For You?

✓ You're tired of explaining your invisible illness to people who say "but you don't look sick" while you struggle with fatigue, pain, and brain fog

✓ You don’t know how to explain your symptoms - both to doctors who need precision and to yourself as you try to track patterns, leaving you wondering if it's "all in your head" despite very real physical experiences

✓ Medical appointments leave you feeling unheard or dismissed, and you struggle to advocate for yourself when brain fog hits during important conversations

✓ You've stopped reaching out to friends and family because you worry about being seen as a burden or "always complaining"

✓ Your emotions feel overwhelming - from rage when another treatment fails to guilt when you have to cancel plans again

✓ You've tried meditation apps and general wellness programs that don't address the unique challenges of navigating life with chronic illness

✓ You feel stuck in "the waiting room" - waiting for a diagnosis, waiting for a treatment to work, waiting to feel like yourself again, or waiting for others to understand

✓ You find yourself saying "I'm fine" when you're not because it's easier than explaining or risking rejection

✓ You want practical tools - not just validation or vague advice to "reduce stress" without showing you how

A woman with long brown hair, glasses, black top, and white pants sitting in a beige armchair in a living room, working on a silver laptop. The room has large windows with wooden blinds, a beige couch, a white lampshade on a gold tripod lamp, green plants, and decorative shelves with art objects and a banana. The floor is covered with a patterned rug.

Kind Words

  • ✸ ✸ ✸ ✸ ✸

    “I have been to a couple of workshops given by Destiny and I look forward to more. The interweaving of how chronic pain/illness affect so much of our lives and other conditions we may have. It is exciting to see someone sharing this information in a way to make it so much more accessible to those of us who need it! So often this information and frank discussions about it with those knowledgeable can be out of reach for many of us. Destiny makes it easier to access and understand.

    If you are on the fence wondering if the workshops are worth it; they are! I cannot express to you how much you will pick up in a short time, but you will. Take the leap and go to one!”

    - Mags N

  • ✸ ✸ ✸ ✸ ✸

    “Found you on Instagram and have been following for a while. Really enjoy the workshops when I can live and appreciate the replays for times I need to catch up or rewatch and make notes. The recent workshop on Understand the Masks we Wear was really good and concise. Loved there were follow up handouts too. Thank You.”

    - Rosalind

  • ✸ ✸ ✸ ✸ ✸

    "As a therapist with chronic illness, I have found this podcast to be invaluable. I love the range of guests Destiny interviews and this podcast has become a go-to resource for my clients. Highly, highly recommend."

    - The Chronic Illness Therapist Podcast listener

LATEST FROM THE PODCAST

The Chronic Illness Podcast

It’s not in your head, you are not a burden, and we’ll prove that to you one episode at a time.

About the podcast
Featured
"Just Move Differently" Is the Physical Therapy Version of "Just Think Positively"
"Just Move Differently" Is the Physical Therapy Version of "Just Think Positively"

If you've ever left a physical therapy appointment feeling like you got handed a printout of exercises and sent on your way, you're not alone — and you're not the problem. The truth is, chronic pain lives at the intersection of biology, psychology, and the relationships we have with our own bodies and our providers. Eighty-five percent of people with low back pain have no identifiable cause on imaging. That doesn't mean the pain isn't real. It means we haven't developed the tools to test for it yet. And 'just move better' is the physical therapy equivalent of 'just think positively' — technically well-meaning, and almost completely unhelpful on its own. Dr. Megan Steele joined me to talk about what good care actually looks like, why your nervous system needs proof before it changes, and how the relationship with your provider might be doing more than the treatment itself.

When Your Illness Has a History: Medical Gaslighting, Invisible Illness, and Why You're Not Imagining It
When Your Illness Has a History: Medical Gaslighting, Invisible Illness, and Why You're Not Imagining It

If you've ever left a doctor's office feeling more dismissed than when you walked in, this one is for you. Dr. Emily Mendenhall — medical anthropologist, Guggenheim Fellow, and author of Invisible Illness: A History from Hysteria to Long COVID — joins me to talk about the long history behind medical gaslighting, why patients with complex chronic conditions are still being dismissed today, and a concept called structural silencing that might finally put language to an experience you've been carrying for a long time.

When Your Nervous System Shows the Problem and Has Part of the Solution: MCAS & Mast Cell Disorders
When Your Nervous System Shows the Problem and Has Part of the Solution: MCAS & Mast Cell Disorders

If you're living with MCAS or any kind of mast cell or histamine-related condition, you already know the exhaustion of not having clear answers. Licensed psychologist Dr. Amanda Whitehouse joins the podcast to talk about what's actually happening in the nervous system when you're living in constant uncertainty — and what it looks like to start healing without pretending that's a simple process.