Hi, I’m Erica Murphy. And I’m not teaching shadow work because I read some Eckhart Tolle books, copied a few courses, and decided “dark feminine” would look hot for social content.

I’m a trained psychotherapist with over a decade of combined schooling, training, supervision, and client hours under my belt . AND I’ve also personally lived through every. fucking. layer of the work I now guide my clients through.

I started my first business, my therapy practice The Way Forward, in January 2021 as a way to escape the oppressive 9-5 work system that had my Good Girl in a chokehold at the time. But as I continued evolving in this work, I noticed something shifting.

I was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the gatekeeping, oppression, and colonization baked into the therapy field. I was also feeling more and more restricted by the rules, practice requirements, and seemingly arbitrary legalities that dictated who I could serve, and when, and how. At this same time I was also growing deeply frustrated with the Western therapy modalities and “love & light” spiritual teachings that were teaching women how to understand and regulate themselves so they could become more well-adjusted to their own repression.

I wanted to know what existed beyond helping women become “better” versions of conditioning that made them more convenient for others instead of more free for themselves. So I went into the shadow. I entered the underworld and went straight into my own darkness. Into everything I’d been taught to believe made me selfish, dangerous, excessive, or bad. My intensity. My desires. My rage. My selfishness.

I discovered that buried inside everything I’d been taught to regulate, heal, integrate, or make more palatable - were fucking enormous amounts of my own untapped power.

This is why I do the work I do. I understand the Good Girl so intimately because I spent the first 30 years of my life mastering the exact identity I now help women dismantle. After spending hundreds of hours with my own shadow and guiding other women through working with theirs, I realized that many of the qualities conventional healing modalities teach us to regulate and contain weren’t pathologies standing between us and our power. They WERE our fucking power sources.

Women didn’t need to become better at controlling these parts of ourselves. We needed to stop being afraid of wielding them to their fullest extent.

My work isn’t about making you better at understanding, regulating, or negotiating with the parts of yourself your Good Girl decided were too dangerous to wield. It’s about deliberately fucking unleashing them as I guide you through a clean, ritualistic kill of the compliance and approval patterns that have kept your power leashed your entire life.

It’s a place to stop hiding your selfishness, hunger, intensity, desire, and audacity and learn how to savor them instead. To see what happens when these parts of you are no longer something you have to manage--but powers you consciously choose to wield with confidence and precision.

We’re not here to make you a better Good Girl.

We’re here to see what becomes possible when the Good Girl gets out of your way -

and you finally find out just how far you can fucking go.

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