“I saw this video on TikTok and it had me balling.”
This is a message I received from my sister regarding a viral message Kobe Campbell posted nearly a year to the date, which has since raked in around 300k views.
“I need to say this,” Campbell begins, who is a licensed trauma therapist. “Healing is not becoming the best version of yourself. Healing is letting the worst version of yourself be loved. So many of us have turned healing into becoming this super perfect version of ourselves. That is bondage, right? That is anxiety waiting to happen. Healing is saying, every single version of me deserves love, deserves tenderness, deserves grace. When we get to a place where we see and can empathize with every version of ourselves, even the version of ourselves that we can sometimes be ashamed of, that’s when we know we’re walking in a path of healing.”
Her spot-on, highly empathetic clips has been resonant with hundreds of thousands of people on TikTok. Incredibly, Campbell doubted whether she should share anything on the internet at all.
“I didn’t have a desire to get on social media in this way at all initially,” Campbell told ESSENCE. “But I think I realized it would be good and innocuous to start sharing little things on my heart that arose from some client therapy sessions.”
In less than two years of joining TikTok, she’s garnered 2.2M likes and more than 100K followers from her heart-led observations about trauma and healing.
“When I started seeing some of the responses, I knew I needed to continue sharing because it landed in the exact way I intended–I felt like it was helping people,” she said. “And then I started to make that transition business wise to say, like, I want to provide value to an audience.”
Campbell’s wellness practice The Healing Circle has been around for four years, but thanks to her parasocial popularity, it has been newly introduced to a new faction of people in search of help.
“When I made that shift, for me, it was always about the principle, not the people,” she said, explaining her decision to overcome the hesitancy around providing her insight on tough topics like trauma management on social media. Since then, she said her clientele has tripled and she’s expanded her team due to high demand. The real-life business success is attributed to her online integrity.
“Rather than putting a person’s story on blast, I’m incredibly careful about sharing only the lessons that people can apply to their lives.”
Along with growing her business, she has written her debut book, Why Am I Like This?
“It was summer of summer of 2021 and I literally said to myself, I want to write a book,” she told ESSENCE. “And I prayed. And literally six weeks later, I had a contract with the agent, which was just wild”
She describes the book as a guide that aims to help us understand why it’s so hard to break these patterns as she offers us a deeper understanding of how our past shapes our present.
And while she’s built a career pouring into others and their growth journey, she says writing the book healed her just as much.
“While working through this, I really learned to live in the fruit of what happens when you decide, I’m going to let someone else see all my problems, and I’m going to trust that they know more about what I’m dealing with than I do. And so my hope is that other people get to experience the fruit of the risk of being seen, the risk of trusting a professional, and the risk of believing that this is not the end of their lives.”