Ciara Miller Doesn't Want West to "Heal" Her
Or, let's chill with the therapy-speak.
I am a big Summer House fan, and an even bigger Ciara Miller fan. And yes it’s partially because she’s black; in the immortal words of Issa Rae, “I’m rooting for everybody black.” More than that, I’ve watched Ciara give her time, heart and attention to a slew of undeserving white boys and I am praaaaaying for her come up.
Which brings me to the subject of this newsletter. On Part 1 of the Season 9 Summer House reunion, we dive into Ciara’s former relationship with cast mate West Wilson. If you’re thinking “Haven’t we tread this ground already?” you’re right, but this time Ciara revealed more about the personal struggles she faced as their relationship met its end, and it was both beautiful and heartbreaking to behold.
In the clip, which you can watch here, she explains that in December of 2023, during the final weeks of her and West’s whirlwind romance, her mother got remarried. Ciara struggled with her mom’s decision to remarry because, in her words, her mom has been married “a couple of times” and Ciara believes her mom deserves the best but often settles for less. What’s more, Ciara and her father no longer speak, so she spent the Christmas holidays hiding out in Costa Rica, not willing to spend time with her father and not wanting to spend time with her mom’s “new family.” As someone who has never spent a holiday away from my family, hearing Ciara describe wanting to escape and “just get through December” brought very real tears to my eyes (which was awkward only because I was watching the episode in an airport terminal).
Ciara talks about how, during this time, she turned her phone off and refrained from reaching out most days because she didn’t want to burden anyone during the holidays. West interpreted this as her shutting him out, and she interpreted his dwindling engagement as him not wanting to be there for her.
When I first saw this clip on TikTok I opened the comment section expecting to see messages of love and support for Ciara — surely everyone had the same heartbroken reaction I did. Instead, I was shocked to see how many commenters were blaming Ciara for expecting West to “heal her trauma”…huh?
I figured I must be missing some context, so I busted out my laptop at Gate 70A in LAX and watched the full episode. I finished it even more confused. First, at no point did Ciara give the impression that she was laying all of her burdens at West’s feet for him to bear; quite the opposite, in fact. She holed up in a foreign country to avoid being a burden to him.
What’s more, Ciara shared this nugget in the comment section of my TikTok reunion recap: “The people who mattered knew how to reach me, and he was one of them.”
What seems clear to me, both from what Ciara shared at the reunion and what she shared in my comments, is that she wasn’t in need of saving. She was, however, hoping to receive love and support from her inner circle…and West fell short. The fact that so many people are accusing Ciara of wanting West to “fix” her underscores something that I’ve been thinking for a while: one of the unfortunate offshoots of the rise of therapy culture is the idea that everyone is solely responsible for their own emotional wellbeing.
Therapy was never meant to isolate us from the support systems we lean on, and the narrative that someone wanting support during a difficult time is “expecting her trauma to be healed” promotes a dangerous form of hyper individualism. As the authors of a recent European Journal of Psychotherapy & Counseling put it, the “widespread cultural fluency in simplified and decontextualized therapeutic language, often marketed as self-help, may be undermining collective well-being.”1
What’s more, I find it incredibly disingenuous to ask women to lend their ears, hearts and wombs to solving the male loneliness epidemic when we can’t even rely on men for, in Ciara’s case, mild consolation.
Maybe I’m over thinking this — we are, after all, talking about a reality show. By signing up for said reality show Ciara agreed to take the good with the bad, the crooked with the straights.2 And after multiple seasons of viewing her in action, I know for certain she doesn’t need West, me, or anyone else to save her.
But would it be so bad if she did?
Excerpt pulled from this article
A very black reference because, as a reminder, I’m rooting for everybody black