THE WRONG THERAPIST

She survived everything she was taught not to name.
Now she must decide what not to pass down.

At sixty-five, Jackie Anderson enters therapy for the first time-not because she is broken, but because silence has finally stopped working.

Raised in Newark in a family where endurance passed for love and quiet meant survival, Jackie learned early how to hold everything together. She became the dependable one. The strong one. The woman who managed chaos without ever letting it show. But when generational wounds begin resurfacing through her children and her granddaughter, Jackie is forced to confront a harder truth: survival alone is not healing.

Told in Jackie's own voice through a series of intimate therapy sessions, The Wrong Therapist: Black, Not Broken is a layered, emotionally precise novel that explores motherhood, marriage, addiction, grief, faith, and the inherited cost of unspoken pain. As Jackie revisits the moments that shaped her family, she begins to see how coping strategies meant to protect quietly shaped harm-and how silence became the most trusted, and most damaging, teacher of all.

This is not a story about blame.
It is a story about choice.
About repair without erasure.
About learning how to soften without disappearing.

With lyrical restraint and unflinching honesty, Kashinda T. Marche examines what it means to interrupt cycles in real time-and to choose truth over endurance. The Wrong Therapist: Black, Not Broken is trauma-informed literary fiction that speaks to anyone who has ever been praised for strength while quietly paying the cost.

Because being built differently doesn't mean being broken.
And healing doesn't require you to disappear to deserve it.