Born on a Monday

Note: If you want to get a sense of where I’m at and who I am, this blog post will probably help.

It’s December 2023 and I’m updating my bio (aren’t we all?)

I am someone on my journey of healing my psyche/self from what my nervous system learned over a childhood of chronic and unsafe situations. The name for what I do has many terms. Healer, coach, counselor, space-holder, listener, co-conspirator, truth-teller, friend. The best description I’ve found for my work can be found in chapter 2 , page 36 of “Understanding and Healing Emotional Trauma” which speaks about people who help others do the inner work necessary to heal emotional trauma:

“Anybody who facilitates healing must know about shame, and the only way that knowledge can be attained is through personal, embodied, right-hemisphere, implicit experience. Moreover, those who help us heal must have come to know their own shame, not because it was a requirement of their training but because it was utterly necessary to their lives, and their own emotional healing.”

“… they need to be a living example of life beyond a shame-based identity…. our unconscious will learn from their example, so it is crucial that the healer is authentically living the process”.

“Rather than hiding behind a therapeutically passive and distant professional persona, she has to be in the healing relationship… the healer and the person looking for healing must come together as two human beings, each with their own struggles, frailties, fallibilities, and vulnerabilities. There must be mutuality and reciprocity.”

I grew up in an emotionally neglectful household and in an evangelical Christianity community. So I had never felt okay or safe, which, I had thought was normal and what everyone else was experiencing. But it turned out I was suffering from complex post traumatic stress disorder and its accompanying emotional trauma. Most of my life has been overwhelming and mentally exhausting due to the internal noise of self-doubt, self-hatred, existential fears, fear of death, fear of aging, depression, anxiety, fear of my own thoughts, and a completely hostile and insane relationship within my mind itself. I’ve spent decades miserable, ruminating, lost in my mind, masking in society, disconnected from my body, angry at religion, angry at my family, distrustful of the world and pessimistic about the future. And masking most of that, even from myself.

Ever since the fall of 2020 when I tried psilocybin for the first time, I began the process of becoming Self aware. Due to religious trauma and other anti-human cultural narratives of my generation, I hadn’t known what thoughts were, what being “legion” might meet, what feelings were, what psychological defenses were, what awareness was, and what it means to “be human”. This has been an incredibly painful journey where I’ve begun to integrate how much of my experience (past and present) I’d had to protect myself from in order to survive the trauma from my childhood. This process has involved derealization, depersonalization, constant anxiety, fearing I am insane, and regular suicidal ideation.

I had taken a pause from public speaking and pursuing coaching clients as I have been going through my own “dark night of the soul” over the last few years. I’ve been discovering repressed trauma and processing it privately with people I am building my first secure/authentic relationships. This is a very raw experience that I don’t share about publicly but will do so privately with individuals and clients. However, this process has given me a perspective that allows me to see what others are going through and help them see it as well. In the last few months I have made some major strides in pulling my Self back together and I want to start working more actively with those who are on this journey, too.

This is the coaching work that I do. In my own process, I have seen the power of deep listening; non-hierarchical support; supporting the development of autonomy, intuition, and awareness; and nervous system regulation techniques. I bring all of this personal, embodied knowledge with me in my coaching. I do not seek to become a licensed therapist nor credentialed coach so don’t expect me to justify my qualifications to you. I am simply offering myself to you as a candid, authentic, living-it-myself human who will be honest with you and treat you with the respect and autonomy you deserve and have regardless of whether you believe you do. I will share from my own pain and experience as well. Within myself, I nurture (not only in sessions with clients but every moment I can for myself) curiosity, presence, awareness, honesty, openmindedness, non-judgment, and acceptance.

If you like qualifications, here’s some stuff for ya. I have administered and have been a facilitator of an ex-religious support group in the Twin Cities since 2015. I have also led breakout sessions at MNPolyCon, facilitated a support group for ethical non-monogamy practitioners, and began the Dying Out Loud movement with Dave Warnock. I served on the Board of MNPoly from 2022-2023. I also work as the Director of Operations for Groove Capital. Additionally, I run my own entrepreneurial endeavors in podcasting, photography, life coaching, “sitting”, blogging, public speaking, and art!