Author · Speaker · Psychotherapist
Desirae Terry, LCSW
For women unraveling perfectionism and learning to live from truth instead of performance.
About Desirae
Desirae Terry is a psychotherapist, mother of three, former elite athlete, and writer exploring perfectionism, chronic illness, motherhood, faith, and the stories women inherit about being good.
Her work offers psychologically informed, emotionally honest writing about breaking free from inherited expectations. She writes for women who have been praised for holding everything together and are quietly wondering what might happen if they stopped.
She and her husband live in Manhattan, where she maintains a private therapy practice and spends a suspicious amount of time playing mahjong, hosting friends around her table, exploring New York with her family, and being lovingly outmatched by her three children.
SPINAL TAP
How My Medical Trauma Uncaged Me
She had built her life on doing everything “right,” mastering the art of shape-shifting to meet expectations as if it were an Olympic sport. When her body broke in a way she could not outperform, optimize, or positive-think her way through, the identity that had protected her collapsed with it.
Spinal Tap examines how perfectionism is installed long before it ever betrays us, and what it takes to dismantle it when survival strategies become prisons. Structured around five internal “Perfect” authorities, the book traces the collapse of the belief that control guarantees safety. After a traumatic pregnancy injury that left her paralyzed, surgically reconstructed, and medically dismissed, these once-protective parts tightened their grip. Recovery required not just physical rehabilitation, but the unraveling of an identity built on performance.
Blending narrative intimacy, humor, and psychological clarity, Spinal Tap interrogates ambition, the cultural praise of overfunctioning women, and the cost of being “good” at everything except telling the truth. Written from the perspective of a disabled mother of three, therapist, and New Yorker, the memoir brings both clinical insight and lived experience to the question of who we become when perfection stops protecting us.
The five Perfects
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