Meraki Healing Center, PLLC

How I came to be a Clinical Trauma Therapist.

Trying to write this bio gives me the same feeling that I would get in school when, at the beginning of a new class, we’d go around the room and have to share “one interesting thing about ourself”. Eek! Hate that moment: so much pressure, this is your first impression of me, and all the sudden I got NOTHING. Well, I’m grateful (now) to be able to respond to my activated nervous system with compassion, understanding, and ease. There’s no rush. I’ve left and come back to this page so many times without changing anything, so I guess at some point I just gotta start somewhere and hit “publish”. If nothing else, at least it will be honoring of where I was at the time I wrote it; if it changes, so be it! It’ll be an appropriate reflection of the way our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors shift with time. So hi! I’m so glad you’re here. Read on to learn a little bit more about how I came to be a trauma therapist with Logos Healing Institute!

I want to start with more about my own journey – my own experiences that led me to this work – because it helps paint a more complete picture of how I ended up here, and why I believe in the healing power of a therapeutic relationship. I do not take the privilege & responsibility of this work for granted.

I first went to therapy when I was a freshman in high school. There were so many things going on in my life; so many difficult experiences that were coinciding with each other, & so much I was grieving, all at once. If you had asked me this at the time, though, I wouldn’t have been able to vocalize that to you. I had learned to disconnect from my body, and from my emotions, many years prior. I was excellent at the facade – no, I don’t think ‘facade’ is right. Double life, maybe? – I had perfected being the outgoing & extroverted friend, hard-working student, go-to babysitter for the town, & dedicated gymnastics coach, while numbing and disconnecting from my internal experiences in other ways whenever I had dreaded free time. I was trying to avoid the thoughts and feelings that were at the core of my suffering: “I’m too much”, “I’m not enough”, “I’m dramatic”, “I need to get over it”, “I’m a baby, there’s nothing really wrong”, “This will never get better”, “Am I making it all up for attention like they’re saying?”, “What is wrong with me? Everything’s wrong with me”, the list goes on. I was hurting, and I had been hurting for many, many years, and I’m so grateful my mom made me go see a therapist, who I was dead set against seeing, because I’m not sure I would’ve gotten through those years without her. I am SO grateful for that therapist because she provided me the compassion, the understanding, and the sanctuary that her office eventually became for me, while being the consistent anchor I needed to be able to rely on as I learned how to feel alive again. Ironically (or maybe a mere foreshadowing of what was to come) her name was Colorado. 🙂

It’s tough to describe how I experienced life during my adolescent years (and before) because, since I’d perfected living a double life, no one really knew what was going on internally – myself included. And it’s true what they say: the body keeps the score. Mine was. Eventually, even though I was trying hard to push it all away and not deal with it, my body was screaming at me that something was – or many things were – wrong. All the disconnecting from my emotions, from my experiences, that I’d started doing (unconsciously!) so long before was making its way to the surface. In dramatic fashion, may I add. I was plagued with so much physical pain that by my senior year of high school, I was bedridden for half the year, unable to function or move. All the western medicine I was fortunate enough to have access to wasn’t helping, wasn’t “fixing it”. It would be another TEN YEARS before I would come to understand that the physical pain I was experiencing was no longer just a result of the back injuries I’d sustained through gymnastics (structural pain), but was the result of faulty misfirings in my brain in an attempt to alert me to danger and keep me safe, keep me alive (neuroplastic pain).

Pain doesn’t only live in the body – it’s processed by the brain. And when the nervous system is stuck in a constant state of fear, hypervigilance, or sadness, pain signals can become amplified and harder to turn off.

Even though I didn’t have the understanding of, or the language for, it yet, I was living in chronic survival modes, fluctuating between being on high alert (hypervigilant, stressed, “go go go!” mode) & absolute shut down (collapsed, exhausted, disconnected). And when we are in survival mode, our brain becomes much more sensitive to threat signals. Pain doesn’t only live in the body – it’s processed by the brain. And when the nervous system is stuck in a constant state of fear, hypervigilance, or sadness, pain signals can become amplified and harder to turn off.

It was after many years of dealing with severe pain flare-ups that completely incapacitated me that I became invested in learning about the nervous system, and started on my own journey of finally healing from something I thought would be part of my story forever. I learned how intricate the relationship between (toxic/chronic) stress & (physical/emotional) pain is, and how to reframe (for myself) what “it’s all in your head” really means. My curiosity sparked a whole new world of exploring for me, and is ultimately what led me to go back to grad school for clinical mental health counseling. (Little side note: the book that I often credit for setting this ball rolling is called The Inflamed Mind: A Radical New Approach to Depression, written by Ed Bullmore. I was on a medical leave from work (yes, to try to heal that pesky back pain), saw it on a shelf in a local bookstore, it caught my attention, and – as they say – the rest is history. Later that summer I would begin my counseling career).

I’m going to save my critiques of the grad school system for another time, but it feels pertinent to share that most of my classes really didn’t pique my interest the way I’d hoped they would: I wanted to know more about the “why” under everything that was being taught, and found myself drawn to opportunities to learn more about trauma and its impact on various aspects of our lives. While my single class on trauma (which was an elective, by the way…) opened up a pathway that would cement my interest in this space (more on that later), it was in many thousands of hours outside of school that I learned more about trauma – specifically complex trauma – and how to work with it from a therapy standpoint. My own personal experiences led to my curiosity about trauma’s impact on the nervous system. I became fascinated with the learnings: for example, that physical pain can be a manifestation of unprocessed trauma; that your brain actually doesn’t know the difference between physical and emotional pain = it’s all just perceived as a threat. And a threat means your brain automatically goes into survival mode. If that threat is constant, all the time, well now you’re living in survival mode, and that’s just unsustainable for your brain to function in. It comes up with strategies to be able to survive, and it will turn to the strategies that have proven to be effective in the past.

And it wasn’t until I went inwards and learned how to sit with and embrace my distressing emotions, sensations, and thoughts, and eventually move through & process the distressing experiences they were tied to, – with the help of therapy! – that I started to experience healing…

I came to understand that so many of the “symptoms” I had experienced over the years – including things that were labeled with different diagnoses in the DSM – were just the manifestations of deeper unhealed trauma. The emotional outbursts, intense mood fluctuations, hypervigilance, extreme fatigue, constant numbing and distraction tools, various detrimental behaviors and thought patterns – these were all just strategies my brain was utilizing to cope with the unbearable pain I hadn’t yet learned how to tolerate, because I didn’t yet have the felt sense of safety to know that these threats (old knowings) were not real; specifically, that they would not kill me. I didn’t have the capacity to turn towards the pain. It would take me a long time to actually come to understand this, and there were many stepping stones on the journey to be able to integrate this knowledge, because just knowing something doesn’t translate to healing: we have to actually experience something different (new learning). And it wasn’t until I went inwards and learned how to sit with and embrace my distressing emotions, sensations, and thoughts, and eventually move through & process the distressing experiences they were tied to, – with the help of therapy! – that I started to experience healing from those symptoms; that I started to rewire the old knowings, correct the faulty misfirings, and incorporate the new learnings. It feels especially important to highlight that this is not a one-size-fits-all journey. Someone who gives you a quick fix checklist or straightforward roadmap is lying. While I believe everyone can benefit from therapy, it’s not always the right time for the deep healing work of trauma therapy; for me, it was a bumpy road that had many peaks & valleys, and I went through different seasons of being resourced enough to engage in it. I think I’ve said this like five times already, but… more on this later, too!

I’m so grateful for the work and life experiences that have brought me here. My journey with chronic pain was just one facet of my healing journey; I saw therapists throughout the proceeding fifteen years of my life to help me heal the wounded parts of myself that were stuck in trauma. I still am! I know therapy will be a part of my story in one shape or another for the long haul, because it is what helps me show up the way I want to show up in the world. It helps me be a better friend, a better sister, a better daughter, a better partner, a better therapist. We all need someone to bear witness to our pain, our struggle. We need someone we can feel safe with, no matter what. We need someone who will respond to us as a human, first. I never thought that I would be a therapist. Truly. I thought I would go to grad school so that I could get the credibility behind my name to go teach and advocate for the policy changes I believed were primary. But then I fell in love with therapy. I discovered – through doing it – a job that melded so many of my passions and interests and strengths together, and things clicked into place. I feel so fortunate for the ability to say that I am moved and changed in my sessions daily. That every single client impacts me, and I learn from them, just as much as – if not more than – they learn from me. I’m grateful for the work that I’ve done, and continue to do, for myself so that I am able to be present enough in my own body to be a regulating presence for theirs.

At the heart of it, this job brings me closer to God every day.

I can’t believe I just typed that. I don’t even know where that came from, it just all the sudden was exactly what I knew I needed to write. I am not a religious person. I started to define and experience my own relationship with God as a freshman in college before later falling away from the church, and have struggled to define my belief system since.

But it is true. This job brings me closer to God every day. I want you to fill in “God” with your word of choice. Maybe it’s Higher Power. Maybe it’s Universe. Maybe it’s Self. Maybe it’s Mother Earth. Maybe it’s Humanity. For me, it’s all of these. When I am really tapped in, and am really present, I am granted the soul-stirring experience of bearing witness to another’s story, another’s truth, and there just isn’t a concise way for me to put words to that experience. It brings out the childlike awe, the wonder, the curiosity, that makes me feel alive. I don’t mean awe at what I’m hearing. No, I mean awe at the healing power of connection. How lucky I am to have this privilege, of holding this experience with you. It harnesses the expansiveness of what it means to be human. To sit alongside you, to have the honor of doing the hard work of building trust, and working through breaches of that trust, and building deeper trust, over & over again, as we work to uncover the hope & joy buried under layers of hurt & despair. To slowly, one baby step at a time, (re)build your ability to have faith in the worthiness of your life. To know that you matter here, and you are so deserving of healing, if for no reason other than you were born and you are here. You deserve to experience the fullness of your right to that healing, because it is yours for the taking, and it will transform your life. No: it will give YOU your life back.

And what, if not that, does it mean to be closer to God?*

When we are given the tools, the resources, to tap into this inherent power, it is like adding the crucial ingredients to a life-changing recipe. (Effective) therapy is transformative because it’s like a building block on the journey back home to yourself. And that’s what my job is.

I purposefully did not talk about the approaches or modalities that I use in this post, nor about the niche population that I specialize in working with. I’ll do that in a different post. Because what drives everything I do is the power of connection. The deep knowing that the greatest gift we can give ourselves is the opportunity for genuine connection. To have someone be witness to our story, and help us stitch back together parts of us that we’ve long learned to dismiss or turn away from, is only done through connection. I found connection with my therapist in high school that saved my life. The people who showed up for me and allowed me to just be, exactly how I was, are the people who have made the longest lasting marks on my life: they are the people who played important roles in helping me reconnect with myself. Because when we experience the healing power of connection with each other, it allows us to experience the even more transformative power of connection to ourselves. When we are given the tools, the resources, to tap into this inherent power, it is like adding the crucial ingredients to a life-changing recipe. (Effective) therapy is transformative because it’s like a building block on the journey back home to yourself. And that’s what my job is. I show up and I bring my whole self into that therapy room in an effort to make it possible for you to do so, too. For you to know that I am in your corner, and there’s nothing too big you can bring that would cause me to turn away from you. There is no trauma that is too great to heal. You deserve long-lasting, genuine healing, and we will plan the course and navigate that journey, together. Thank you – so much – for being here.

*This is a rhetorical question; I don’t know if I really connected the two well, but it clicked in my head and resonated in my body, so I’m going with it!

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This blog is not medical advice, nor is it to be substituted for therapy. This is my own personal journey, with my own personal opinions and experiences, and I write from a lens and approach to mental health that may be different than yours. I encourage you to consult with your own therapist or medical professionals if you are experiencing symptoms that are interfering with your daily functioning. Please know help is available.