The Heart Behind My Work: A Personal Journey Of Healing
The Heart Behind My Work: A Personal Journey of Healing
Welcome to my blog - I’m so glad you’re here! In this first entry, I want to share why I’m passionate about helping people heal. My hope is that by sharing my journey, you’ll feel inspired to approach your own with greater self-compassion. I am human, imperfect, and have faced and struggled through much of my own wounding along the way. My highest intention is for you to find hope in knowing that, no matter where you are in your journey, healing is possible for you too!
The Early Struggles That Led to a Deeper Purpose
In my teens and early twenties, I struggled with depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and difficulties with emotional intimacy. When I began therapy, I had no idea I was dealing with attachment trauma. I didn’t yet understand what complex trauma was and believed I had grown up in a “happy enough” family. At the time, I thought trauma only referred to big, catastrophic events - which I didn’t think I had experienced.
As I am a therapist now, you might be surprised to hear that my first experiences with therapy were, to be completely honest, quite awful. I saw my first therapist at 15, and my main memory of her is sitting in silence while she stared at me, occasionally repeating back what I had said. It felt cold and unhelpful. My second therapist was a man in his 50’s whose primary intervention was to tell me to smile more. As you can imagine, this did nothing to address the deep pain and unprocessed grief I was carrying—in fact, it made things worse. I started to believe that my suffering was beyond help, that no one knew how to help me, and that the pain would never go away.
I was then placed in a residential treatment center for adolescent girls in Utah. I was there for over 9 months and experienced what I now understand to not only be bad therapy, but outright abuse. The details of this experience could be an entire book in itself. However, what I learned from this at the time was that therapy is dangerous and that I needed to be very careful about who I trusted. When I look back on this experience, I now see a lot of examples of harmful therapy, and it fuels my passion to provide trauma-informed therapy - to be the therapist I had needed back then. (The treatment center was sued and shut down in 2022).
After my residential treatment experience, I went through about 7 years of heightened symptoms of anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, eating challenges, and I was highly anxious, reactive, and avoidant in romantic relationships (known as a disorganized attachment). As I was managing a whirlwind of challenge, I was committed to figuring out why I was feeling this way and how to help myself heal - somehow through all of these challenges I managed to stay connected to hope that things could get better…somehow.
When I was 25, I was in a romantic relationship that was quite challenging - in reflection, I would say this relationship was about 20% enjoyable and 80% hard - oof. From my perspective now as a therapist, I can say that we went through most of the challenging dynamics that are possible between couples, all within that one relationship! 😅. During that relationship, my partner was seeing a therapist who she loved; she asked me many many times to also see that therapist. Since I had so much trauma in therapy, I didn’t want to - but eventually I caved as a way to make her stop asking me - and in hindsight I am so very glad I did!
The Turning Point: Discovering the Potential of Healing
This therapist, let’s call her Emily, was the start to my shift in seeing the potential of therapy and healing. In the therapy, I could feel that she cared about me and saw me as good and worthy - and this brought up all of my wounding where I felt so much shame around being unlovable. During my first year of being her client I experienced so much healing and hope from the work, that I decided to go to graduate school to become a therapist myself.
While the foundations of the therapy with Emily were extremely helpful and healing for me, we eventually hit a spot where, not only was she was unable to help me, but my symptoms starting increasing - I started having flashbacks, crying spells, and panic attacks. I didn’t understand why this was happening to me. Emily shared that she believed I had significant attachment trauma, and acknowledged that she was not trained in trauma. This eventually lead me to need to leave the therapy with Emily in pursuit of a clinician who was trained and skilled at helping clients heal attachment trauma. Through this experience I learned that therapy that is not trauma-informed has the potential to create unintentional harm for the client.
This began my journey of working with clinicians who are trauma-informed, and allowed me to deepen the healing of my childhood. Working with a skilled trauma-informed therapist helped me feel more comfortable with all my emotions, increased my capacity to handle stress, and expanded my ability to connect with others.
Simultaneously, I was in graduate school and learning about psychotherapy. To my disappointment, much of what I was learning was pathology based (disorder and illness based) and not trauma-informed (symptoms are derived from trauma symptoms and/or other holistic factors that are out of balance that make sense!).
Very luckily (and unfortunately uncommon in the US), my trauma class did teach about CPTSD! Learning specifically about how trauma impacts the sense-of-self and the nervous system in a cohesive manner was a true light-bulb moment for me. Suddenly, all of the bits and pieces I had been learning through my own therapy and my own hypotheses that I had put together from various other modalities were coming together!
After finishing this class, I enrolled in a therapist training called the NeuroAffective Relational Model, which is a thorough approach to healing complex trauma from the same perspective as I had been learning in my trauma class. This training enhanced my knowledge significantly about the nuances of both the wounding of complex trauma and how to heal.
The Transformative Power of Psycho-Education for Healing
What has stood out to me about graduate school and other therapist trainings I attended is many of the clinicians were not only at the trainings to learn about helping their clients heal, but to help themselves heal. The knowledge I gained from graduate school, the NARM trainings, and other various trauma-informed trainings I have attended have enhanced my own healing significantly, and transformed my therapy process - the healing process looks different when the client has more psycho-education to begin with - more healing is possible much more quickly!
It is because of this that I feel so passionate about expanding the education about the source of complex trauma symptoms and the path to healing trauma symptoms to the general public - this information has the potential to be the catalyst of transformation for so many people.
I am profoundly grateful for my own healing and recovery. And I am also far from complete, as healing is a life-long process, full of new depths of healing presented as we continue to grow. If any healer ever tells you that they are fully healed—be wary; from my lessons, that is quite the red flag.
However, I have not only healed much of my wounding, but helped many people in my therapy practice heal their woundings and move into greater connection with themselves and their loved ones. They’ve built greater confidence and self-esteem, felt more at peace with themselves, and moved through their days with much less unnecessary stress and anxiety. It’s an immense honor to walk alongside others on their journeys. Witnessing the growth and transformation of my clients through the therapeutic process is a privilege I hold close to my heart.
I’m excited to begin offering healing tools and resources on a larger scale through the workshops I have planned here! Healing is not something we need to do alone, and I’m here to offer a safe, compassionate space to support your growth.
If you’re ready to take the next step, I invite you to explore the healing workshops and services I’ve created. No matter where you are on your journey, you don’t have to navigate it alone.
My upcoming offering is a FREE live Path To Healing Masterclass on Sunday, January 19th where I will be sharing about the root of so many mental health symptoms, why your symptoms make sense, and will be sharing some tools to support you in your healing! Click here to sign up!