I Paid a 'Denim Therapist' $500 an Hour to Tell Me My Jeans Were Haunted. She Was Right.

An Op-Ed by Waverly Ashton-Cole, Brooklyn-based wellness content creator, founder of the Substack 'Soft Mornings with Waverly,' and current owner of zero pairs of jeans.

I want to be clear about something before we begin: I am not a gullible person.

I have a master's degree in narrative wellness from a university in Vermont that I will not name because their alumni association recently sent me a fundraising email and I am still processing my feelings about the boundary violation. I have done EMDR. I have done cold plunges. I have done a ten-day silent retreat in New Mexico where I paid $4,800 to not speak and eat miso soup and confront what my facilitator called my 'shadow self,' which turned out to be mostly just unresolved feelings about my college roommate.

I am, in other words, a sophisticated consumer of the wellness industrial complex.

And then I met Paloma.

How I Found the Denim Therapist

Paloma Vreeland describes herself on her website as a 'somatic denim practitioner and textile grief counselor.' Her credentials include a certification from the Institute for Embodied Fashion Healing in Santa Fe, a two-year apprenticeship with a 'fiber shaman' in Taos, and what she calls a 'lived experience with destructive denim patterns,' which she elaborates on in a 600-word bio I have read eleven times.

She charges $500 per hour. She does not offer a sliding scale. When I asked about this, she said, 'Financial discomfort is part of the work,' and I wrote that down in my journal because it felt important.

I found her through a sponsored post on Instagram. The caption read: 'Your jeans are not just jeans. They are the physical manifestation of every story you've been told about your body, your worth, and your belonging. Are you ready to release them?'

I was wearing jeans when I read this. I immediately felt watched.

I booked a consultation.

The First Session: What Paloma Found in My Denim

Paloma works out of a studio in the West Village that smells like palo santo and something I can only describe as 'expensive linen.' The walls are painted in a shade she calls 'Witnessed Gray.' There is no couch. There are floor cushions, a weighted blanket, and a low table on which Paloma had arranged my jeans — all seven pairs, which she had asked me to bring — like evidence at a crime scene.

She stood over them in silence for approximately four minutes.

'These are carrying a lot,' she said finally.

'They're from Madewell,' I offered.

She looked at me with the gentle pity of a woman who has seen too much. 'The brand is irrelevant,' she said. 'The energy is ancestral.'

What followed was a two-hour session in which Paloma held each pair of jeans, pressed them to her sternum, and described what she was 'receiving.' My dark-wash straight-legs, she said, contained 'a pervasive sense of maternal disapproval and a longing for structure that was never provided.' My distressed boyfriend jeans were 'screaming.' My one pair of white jeans, which I had owned for three years and worn twice, carried what Paloma called 'aspirational grief — the mourning of a version of yourself you were never going to become anyway.'

I cried about the white jeans for twenty minutes. I'm not proud of this. I'm also not entirely sure it was about the jeans.

The Recommendations: A Phased Denim Departure

At the end of the session, Paloma presented me with a handwritten document she called a 'textile release plan.' It outlined a three-phase process for 'consciously separating' from my denim.

Phase one involved writing a letter to each pair of jeans. Not metaphorically — an actual letter, addressed to the garment, acknowledging what it had provided and what it had cost me emotionally.

I wrote seven letters. The one to the distressed boyfriend jeans took forty-five minutes and touched on themes I had not discussed with my actual therapist, who charges $180 an hour and has a PhD and has never once asked me to correspond with my clothing.

Phase two involved the physical release — donating, discarding, or in two cases, what Paloma called 'ceremonial burial,' which is exactly what it sounds like and which I performed in my building's rooftop garden at 7 a.m. on a Tuesday while my neighbor walked by with his dog and asked no questions.

Phase three was the replacement phase. Paloma recommended I transition to what she called a 'denim-free wardrobe architecture' built around natural fibers, loose silhouettes, and garments that 'do not attempt to define the body's boundaries.' She provided a curated shopping list. The least expensive item was a $290 linen shirt. The most expensive was a pair of hand-woven Japanese cotton trousers at $1,840, which Paloma described as 'the antithesis of everything denim represents.'

I bought the trousers. I am wearing them as I write this. They are extraordinarily comfortable and I feel faintly ridiculous and also deeply at peace, which is a combination I have come to associate with spending money I don't have on things I don't understand.

What I Have Learned (An Honest Assessment)

I have now had six sessions with Paloma. I have spent $3,000. I own no jeans. I own a vocabulary that includes phrases like 'embodied textile shame,' 'denim-coded identity suppression,' and 'the indigo wound,' which is apparently what Paloma calls the collective psychic damage caused by the fashion industry's century-long insistence that a stiff, uncomfortable fabric is appropriate for all occasions.

Do I believe any of this? I have been asking myself this question for three weeks.

Here is what I know: I feel lighter without the jeans. Whether that is because Paloma has successfully guided me through a somatic release of ancestral textile trauma, or because I have simply stopped wearing pants that require me to lie down to zip them, I genuinely cannot say.

I know that I nodded for two hours while a woman held my Madewell straight-legs to her chest and told me they were grieving. I know that I wrote a letter to a pair of jeans. I know that I buried two garments in a rooftop garden while a Labrador watched.

I know that Paloma has a six-month waitlist and that I referred two friends.

I know that the wellness industrial complex is a $4.5 trillion machine specifically engineered to locate your most tender uncertainties and sell them back to you at a markup, wrapped in linen and scented with palo santo.

I know all of this.

I have my next appointment on Thursday.

I'm thinking about asking Paloma about my coats.