In 2015, local writer, family therapist, and mom Allyson Dinneen decided she was ready to do things her way, rather than in the way someone else had decided they should be done. She started writing words of comfort and reassurance on Post-it notes and publishing them on her new Instagram NotesFromYourTherapist. She began to think of it as her own private studio, and was surprised when people starting to follow her there.
The page was featured in The Edge in early 2019, when Allyson’s followers numbered 30,000. The day she hit 50,000, a literary agent reached out and asked if she’d like to find a book publisher. In the past two years, her followers have multiplied to more than 330,000.
Allyson found her niche, and sparked a bidding war for her new book, by helping to normalize uncomfortable and painful feelings. Her knowledge is hard-won, through firsthand experience of early, and mid-life, trauma. Her book, “Notes From Your Therapist,” was released on January 11, by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Allyson was born just over the state line in Canaan, Conn., on a dairy farm. I’ll let her pick up her extraordinary story from there.
My mother was the first love of my life. She died flying a small plane, when I was not quite four years old. I was there at the little airport with my baby brother and sister. We’d just been up flying with her. It was late in the day and I thought we were all going home, but she wanted to go up one last time. My mother was passionate about flying. I wanted to go with her, but she said, “No, you stay here, I just want to try something.” I was on the runway when her plane crashed on takeoff.
My father moved in with my grandparents and they found some distant relatives by marriage to take care of us kids. We lost our mom, then our dad disappeared. He remarried when I was six, and she had little kids, too. They were young parents, each dealing with a lot of grief and trauma and suddenly they had five kids under age six. They were overwhelmed and unhappy. There was a lot of rage, depression, chaos, substance abuse, and violence.
Everyone went about pretending my mother had never existed. We never talked about her. It was taboo to talk about sadness or loss. That is probably why I like to talk about things that people haven’t been allowed or are afraid to talk about.
I left home at 18 to study art at Manhattanville College and sunk into a depression. I had been so excited to leave home. But I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and I was failing school. Old grief was finally catching up with me.
A friend said, “They have therapists here. You can get help.” I went to see this counselor who asked me what I wanted to do. No one had ever asked me that.
I said, “I want to go backpacking around Europe.” So I dropped out and did that.
Then I came back and settled in Great Barrington, because in Canaan there was too much trauma.
I started therapy for real in my early twenties. My therapist was very influential in changing my life. I thought I would love to do what he does one day, to have meaningful, honest conversations with people about their lives. I’d started writing and realized that was not going to turn into a money-making job. But the idea of being a therapist is also about story. Real people and their life stories.
I’ve always been curious about how people cope with life. As a kid I survived by reading all the time. Everything on my grandparents bookshelves or from the small town library. Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Agatha Christie, Edgar Allan Poe, Nancy Drew, and “A Tale of Two Cities.” After having two kids, I thought, “this is the time for me now.” I went back to school at 37 to become a therapist. I worked at The Brien Center then, and thought, “I’ll never have more kids, I love my new work so much.” Then I met Rafe, the second love of my life, and that changed everything.
You know how you know everybody if you’ve lived around here long enough? He was a friend of my best friend. I was not at all interested in a younger man. I met him when I was 40 and thought, “Please, let him be in his 30s!” He had JUST turned 30. And not only that, he wanted to get married and have kids. At first I was like, “This is NOT going to work.” But I loved him so much. I thought, “I guess I could do this one more time.”
I’ve never been happier. The thing I felt immediately with him was that feeling of home that I had never had before. I felt, “He is my home.”
He was so happy when I got pregnant, and was devastated when I lost the first baby at five months. The doctor said, “You need to wait [to try to get pregnant again].” I asked if there was a medical reason, and he said there wasn’t. I said, “The way I’m going to process my grief is by getting pregnant again.” I did. I got pregnant two months later. I’m so glad she got here in time. I definitely felt, “This has to happen.”
Looking back, I feel like I sensed he wasn’t going to be here long. He said, at the time, he was the happiest he’d ever been and that he had everything he’d ever wanted. He died when I was on maternity leave, when our daughter was three months old. [Rafe Kozaka died on September 10, 2008, in a logging accident.]
Like my mother, Rafe followed his passion. When I was kid, I found these letters my mother had written, so I knew nobody wanted her to fly. Her parents didn’t want her to. Us kids didn’t want her to. But my father loved her and said, “As long as you’re happy,” but I don’t know if he wanted her to, either.
Rafe, that was something I loved about him, too. Being a lumberjack, climbing trees, was his obsession. He lived and breathed it. He just wanted to be with trees and talk about trees and logging and climbing all day long. And I loved that about him.
Someone said, after he died, “Did you know that being a lumberjack is one of the most dangerous jobs in the world?” I said, “No, but it wouldn’t have made any difference. I wouldn’t have told him not to pursue what he loved.”
In the aftermath of his death, I quit my job. I went back to therapy. I needed help with the grief. I remember saying, “There is no way I can be a therapist again.” I could barely help myself, how would I help anyone else? This is a small town. Who’s gonna come see me? Everyone’s gonna think, “My thing pales in comparison to that.” My therapist laughed and said, “That is exactly why people will come to you, because they know you have the capacity to hold pain.”
It took me years to recover. It was six years after Rafe died before I considered going back to being a therapist. But this time, I was going to do it my way. I didn’t know what that looked like. There were no therapists on Instagram then [in 2015.] It was just a photo app. People weren’t writing on it much. It [the Instagram page] was my writer self coming back to life, too. All this I see now in retrospect. What I thought then was just, “Here is a way to let local people see what kind of person I am, a therapist, someone writing about emotions and relationships.”
I wanted to say things out loud. It was the first time I put a voice to my childhood silence. To talk about emotional pain in public, out loud, to admit that you were hurting, was the ultimate shame, the ultimate taboo. It was an outlet for me, talking about these things.
People started to share the notes, which I didn’t expect at all. I was able to see, “Oh, people really need this permission.” I wasn’t sure if I should do it in the beginning, because therapists aren’t supposed to talk about their personal lives. I asked a mentor and she said, “Anything positive that you’re putting into the world, keep doing it.”
Nothing I write about is specific only to me. I try to write about things I think can apply to people because they are simple and universal, things people have never had permission to talk about.
People wanted more resources, and I would offer them. At some point, someone said, “Would you write a book?” I had such a devoted little following. I’m an artist, and a do-it-yourselfer, so I created a little collection of notes for people to give away at Christmas. It just felt like an art project for the people who follow my page. I had one finished book and put it on Instagram, and 500 people preordered it that day.
I let people continue to buy it online. I could see how it, talking about emotions, could turn into a cottage industry. I saw the parenting edition, the relationship edition. The day my account hit the 50,000 mark, I remember sitting on my couch, not believing my eyes. Oh my God! I am the most unlikely Instagram phenom!
That day, a literary agent reached out to me and said, “I think your little book is publishable. Would you like to find a publisher?”
In 2019, there was a bidding war between four publishing houses. My agent told me to be by my phone on Thursday, when they were having the auction. Before it started, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt made a preemptive bid.
The book is mostly new material, with some popular old notes on the subject of emotions and trauma and relationships. It’s for someone who’s not sure if how they feel is okay, someone who needs reassurance that there is not something wrong with them because they have painful feelings, or are struggling.
I used to think I’d be a therapist who did a little writing, and now I am a writer with a little therapy practice.
Something I’m going to write about in the future is how people think, “Why should I be the one to go first when things are hard in relationships and life?” I want to tell them to be a person who’s willing to go first.
