By Natalie Johnson
Therapist Amanda Baker spent a decade watching the mental health system label people as disordered. Then she stopped waiting for permission to do it differently.
A client sat across from Amanda Baker searching for a sign she was still connected to the father she had lost. She had been asking the universe for hearts and finding them, a folded towel, a swirl of chocolate at dinner. She was working through her grief and also needed hope. None of it felt like enough.
Then, mid-session, she stopped.
“Amanda,” she said. “Your shirt has a heart on it.”
Baker looked down. It did. A Fourth of July shirt she had changed into before the session for no reason she could name. It was September.
Baker was stopped cold. She disclosed it simply: she had just changed her shirt, she said, without knowing why. That was all she could offer.Chills ran down both of their arms. They held eye contact. The client started to tear. What unfolded was not a clinical technique or a planned intervention but a shared human moment, unrepeatable and unplanned. And in it, the client started to believe. Not in something outside herself, but in herself.
“Those moments happen all the time,” Baker said, “when you stop trying to control every single thing about how you show up.”
That willingness to trust the unscripted sits at the center of everything Baker is building. After more than a decade as a licensed clinical social worker, she has launched You Amaze Me LLC, a Baltimore-based integrative wellness brand combining yoga-based therapy, somatic practice and creative expression. It is, in her telling, less a business than a quiet act of rebellion against a system she loves too much to leave.
The Anger That Stayed
Baker was the teenager friends called at 11 p.m., the one who could sit with someone else’s pain without needing to fix it. She earned her master’s in social work from the University of Maryland, built her clinical practice experience across residential treatment, schools and group practices, and spent years doing what therapists are trained to do.
Then it started to feel like not enough.
“There is a stagnancy in traditional talk therapy,” she said. “You change beliefs, identify patterns. But it does not go deeper into the body. And the real change lives in the body.”
During the pandemic, Baker completed a 300-hour yoga psychology certification. What she found changed her clinical thinking entirely. Breathwork, somatic awareness, the mind-body connection: not supplementary tools, she came to believe, but the missing architecture of lasting mental health care.
“I was angry that yoga was and still is not included,” she said. “I was also angry at the high case-load, demands of documentation, and fear used as the motivator for compliance and control in many of these systems. And when I get angry, I usually leave. That is my pattern.”
She had left three practices before. This time, she stopped asking for permission.
The Label Problem
Baker has spent years watching what happens after a diagnosis lands. People begin to organize their identities around it. The person with ADHD becomes someone even more distracted , shameful, and hyperfixated to get themselves to focus. The label, meant to clarify, calcifies. It adds pressure and sometimes even an excuse.
“When we really believe the disorder, there is a barrier to healing it,” she said. “But when we ask what this symptom is signaling rather than what is wrong with this person, the symptoms reduce. Sometimes to the point where the label no longer applies.”
Baker shares that when looking deeper many of the diagnoses are actually adaptations and normal nervous system responses to unnatural and/or stressful external circumstances.
Her approach treats sensitivity and unprocessed experience as the real story behind many diagnoses. Anxiety, depression, trauma responses are not malfunctions, she argues. They are messages. “Every symptom is a signal,” she said. “It is not about feeling better. It is about being better at feeling.”
The Mess
Baker’s phrase, your mess is your message, came to her by inversion. A business owner she knew had fired an employee for sharing candid, emotional videos online. The owner called it making your mess your message. Baker heard it differently.
“Expression and your lived experience is the message,” she said. “The more I started showing up that way, the more my clients opened up in ways they never had before.”
Baker also used to prepare and pre-plan every yoga class she facilitated and most therapy sessions ahead of time. She learned in her first 200hr teacher training to cue a certain way and use a specific sequence. This did not feel natural to her and Baker started to go off script. Eventually this became intuitive teaching and she developed therapeutic yoga classes and yoga-based individual therapy. Her presence became the medicine.
She describes the slow work of unlearning: the training that said do not self-disclose, stay neutral, stay blank, follow steps. What she found underneath was someone her clients could finally see. And when they could see her, they let themselves be seen.
“I had clients tell me things after two years that they had never said before,” she said. “That authentic reciprocity, that is the therapeutic intervention.”
A Message for the Ones Still Inside
Baker worries about therapists leaving the field for coaching and consulting and any title that does not come with insurance panels and productivity quotas. She understands the impulse. She also thinks it costs something.
“If they all go, what happens to mental health? To social work, to counseling, to psychologists who actually care?”
Her message is simple: trust yourself, find community and speak up even when it does not land.
Baker is dedicated to staying inside the field until forced otherwise.
“Success to me is that I shared this until I had no more fight left,” she said. “I took the risk and I shared it anyway.
That’s trust in one self and you do not have to do it alone.”
Amanda Baker is a licensed clinical social worker and 500-hour registered yoga teacher based in Baltimore, Md. She is the founder of You Amaze Me LLC. Learn more at youamazeme.org or follow her on Instagram and listen to the You Amaze Me podcast on Spotify and YouTube.
