Meet Carinthia Bank

Formerly, a professional ballet dancer. Currently, a therapist.

Article By: Carinthia Bank


I went to ballet boarding school for four years, and then danced in a ballet company in Ukraine for one year, including several months touring France. Then, I retired.

When I retired from professional ballet in 2013, I was excited. There were a million things I wanted to do – things I hadn’t had time for when ballet was my life. Three months later, my daily life was a joyous exploration of the world beyond ballet, but I also started to notice a little feeling of emptiness in the vicinity of my heart. It wasn’t until a year later that the little empty hole had come to feel like nearly all of me. 

On my outer edges, I was still ecstatic about life beyond ballet, but the rest of me felt like an abyss that ballet had left behind, and the abyss felt guilty, conflicted, boundless, and incredibly lonely. At that point, I had never heard about transition and it hadn’t occurred to me that anyone could help. 


Athletes Retiring For Strange Reasons

Then, one night, some part of me decided to google “athletes who retired young for strange reasons.” 

My retirement was a choice – a choice that provided me with seemingly endless reasons to feel guilty and confused - and I wanted to know that someone else had made a similar choice and coped with the consequences. 

I would like to say that this google search started to close the hole, but it didn’t.

The google search showed me that I was not alone, which gave me hope, but I explored the extent of the hole and lived and cried as the hole (I felt like I was a hole) for a while longer before it started to feel smaller and smaller, and I began to find that I did exist beyond that space.

Coping with transition can take more than a google search

I needed more than one google search. I needed to keep connecting with kind people who got it and shared their compassion with me, to keep being validated by people who didn’t have the lived experience but were still willing to listen, and to find my own way to feel like I could use my pain to help other people. 


And that’s what brought me here.


I have been incredibly fortunate to get the support I needed to feel how I do today – that my hole is a tiny dot that matters, but not too much or too big. My goal is to use my experience existing as the hole, along with all the conversations, classes, conferences, readings, and workshops that have helped me to shrink the hole so that I can help you in your journey to feeling whole after leaving your activity.

Transition is only one part

Part of coping with the hole has been coping with my relationship with ballet, but it has also included learning about who I am and want to be. Caring for all of me has been part of this process and I welcome conversations about all things that you want to talk about. Not every session has to be all about transition!


This brings me to who I work with...

  • College athletes whose seasons were canceled due to COVID.

  • High school seniors recruited to play a sport in college who suffered career ending injuries before setting foot on campus.

  • Professional athletes cut from a team and under pressure to support their families financially.

  • Professional ballet dancers whose companies are closed for the foreseeable future due to COVID.

  • College seniors who know they won't continue their sport after graduation


How my transitions brought me here...

When I retired from ballet, I went to Princeton. During my junior year at Princeton, after deciding that I did not want to work in the Italian furniture design industry as I had briefly thought, I realized that the most meaningful part of my life was the student group I’d started for athletes and artists navigating transition.

By this time, I was in a more peaceful place in my transition, so I felt safe, healthy, and happy when I thought about making that work into my career. I decided to become a therapist.

I completed my master’s in social work at Penn and then went to Scotland on a Fulbright. There, I did my master’s in sport psychology, finishing up with a dissertation that looked at athletes’ experiences of social support during the process of transitioning out of sport.


If you join me for therapy...

I listen to what you want to say, ask questions, and share my thoughts. I find visual and experiential learning helpful, so I may suggest we do an activity together, like making a map of the important people in your life or drawing a timeline of your mood this week. My goal is to create a space where we can not only explore you, but also explore how therapy works best for you. Every person has a different way of doing therapy and every client- therapist relationship is unique. We will build our own dynamic and it will evolve over the course of our work together.


I understand...

I left ballet with zero planning for my life afterwards and, when I started to have a hard time, I thought I was totally alone. I can help you by being there with you, whether you’re planning for your transition, in the midst of the journey, or years down the line with some lingering things you’d like to work on. I can help you process what you’re feeling, what you’re needing, and how you want to move forwards. I will use my lived experiences with ballet and as a client in therapy, what I’ve learned through my classes, research, and conversations, and my passion for this work that we will do together. I will offer my support as we learn about you and explore how you can do what you want to be doing.

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Carinthia Bank is a therapist in Philadelphia, PA. She works with individuals managing major life transitions, like the retirement from sport, a major move, or a change in relationship status. She can help you get to where you want to be in a way that feels good to you. To schedule with Carinthia click here.