How I went from living in trauma response to a life of power, pleasure and peace.  

I grew up in the 80’s to deeply loving and hardworking entrepreneurial parents who didn’t think too deeply about their own traumatizing childhoods and, like all of our parents, were just doing the best they could with the skills and resources that were available to them. Their business was in production, so they had a blue collar mentality about work and how one must and should work.

My mother is indigenous and my father is white from a colonial settler family line. His parents considered themselves to be quite boojie, while my mothers parents were humble and poor. Both family lines had immense traumas and each of my grandparents carried the burdens of their traumas in their own unique ways, which they, of course, modeled to my parents who recapitulated and adapted in their own unique ways..  

My highest values (Freedom, Health and Wellness, Self Realization, Beauty, Autonomy and Creativity) were cultivated at a young age as a result of the spectrum of my childhood experiences and conditioning and my responses to those. As a child I thought, for sure, I would become an artist. I had unwavering confidence in my gifts and potential as an artist. I got attention for my talent as well as my beauty. Over time I learned that artists were starving and not highly valued, unless you were exceptionally lucky, famous and likely privileged with wealth and resources. As for beauty, my two older brothers taught me to covet beauty while being ashamed of my own. Good times (lol).. In addition to my values, I learned comic relief and all kinds of ways to distract and disassociate from the generations of pain that little girl carried. She was to be the one to heal the ancestral trauma .. at least one of the ones. 

From then until now I have made it my lifestyle to prioritize the health and healing of mind, body spirit, which has led me on a journey to radical responsibility for how I continue to show up with my Self and my relationships. To do so, requires curiosity, compassion, humility, honesty, ego deaths, detoxification, doing hard things and having hard conversations. 

In my world, I define healing as the return to my True Self. To do so, I had to unlearn the programs, unpack the stories, deprogram the conditioning, decolonize my mind, reset the nervous system and reclaim the Truth of who I AM. It’s not a small thing. It has taken most of the 49 years of my life to say that I have arrived at a plateau where I can rest in my Self worth, Self Love, safety and security that brings a level of regulation that only this kind of work rewards. This plateau is only a stop along the way of a life long journey. I am always a work (of art) in progress. 

The journey of returning to my True Self was initially propelled by many holistic modalities, with some of the firsts being yoga, shamanism, energy work, constitutional homeopathy, flower remedies and food as medicine. Today, my lifestyle is oriented around healthy choices.

I had my daughter at 19 many moons ago. As a single mom, this leg of the journey gifted me with a rich curriculum of personal development while cultivating character, resourcefulness, strength and grit. During this chapter I lived unconsciously in my wounding and unknowingly suffered in an ever fluctuating sea of trauma responses including dissociation, anxiety, chronic pain and depression. I medicated with a lot more yoga and wholesome veganism, goddess gatherings and reiki sessions. For years I blamed a lot of people and scenarios around me including my parents, my brothers, the government, the MIA baby daddy, patriarchy and it was all valid.. Yet, my deepest healing moments are those of forgiveness and radical self responsibility when I ask myself, “How am I contributing to my own suffering?” The more honest I am, the more liberated I can be of my suffering.

Soon I started a business and I became a boss of employees and I was adulting on a new level. It was nearly 6 years of supporting us with a small business that lives on to thrive in the community today. Being a momtrepreneur wasn’t without a lot of sacrifice. During that time, it seemed all I did was work. My daughter didn’t receive the attention and presence she deserved. I reached burn out and experienced an abusive relationship. My mental health was suffering and I did not have the support I needed. I turned to a psychologist who was able to provide EMDR to help me unlock a blocked childhood memory. The therapy was not good. There was little safety, and zero integration. After the session, I became my inner hypervigilant 4 year old self. For nearly four months my anxiety and rage were unhinged and my family wanted to put me in the hospital. I sold my business which was also a traumatizing process.  
Basically, therapy fucked me up worse than I was before. I was re-traumatized and there was no support after the EMDR process. In a sense, bad therapy was a major setback in my healing journey, yet over time, it brought me to a whole new layer of self awareness and a deep understanding of how trauma and compounding traumatic experiences affects people. It brought me into a long chapter of research and study around the topic of trauma.

I learned I had PTSD and I became aware of clinical terms, diagnosis and definitions in the world of mental health. Although, “disorders” as the DMV-5 (Rockefeller family’s allopathic model) definitions can be helpful, I would rather call them “responses”..(Example: PTSR, Post Traumatic Trauma Response) As I learned more about my symptoms and how they related to childhood trauma, everything clicked, AND I had a lot of work to do to reconcile with many new awarenesses that blew my world apart. In fact, if I would have known how long it would take to feel regulated in my body, mind and spirit, I’m not sure if I would have persevered with such hope and optimism at my core. 

Getting bad therapy soon became my why for offering yoga for trauma healing. Back in the early 2000’s, I created workshops for women to heal trauma in yoga spaces. Shortly after I became a clinical hypnotherapist and soon after that I became a coach and counsellor. I have been a little obsessed with finding ways to heal trauma that are safe and integrative.

I came to understand that trauma was a world wide epidemic and that no one was free from trauma in their lives. I learned about intergenerational trauma and how colonial culture severely traumatized my family line, eventually traumatizing me. For many years I was obsessed with trauma.. I wanted to learn and work in the trenches. I wanted to understand trauma by working with people with the worst trauma stories that exist. I spent nearly two years working in the Downtown East Side, as Gabor Maté did, witnessing just how much trauma can erode the human spirit of individuals and of collectives, yet there can be hope… AND from that experience, I concluded that hope barely exists with in the system and the government funded regulated programs. I noticed how the system in which we live uses trauma against those within it. Through intimate experiences and time in the trenches it became undeniably clear to me that trauma is a pillar in the colonial medical industrial complex. Without it, what we call the matrix doesn’t have a leg to stand on.

Bad therapy, a broken system and my devotion to offering “good therapy” continues to be my why behind the work I do and how I do it. The therapist I reached out to in my most acute time of need only provided the process and not the safety or integration necessary for healing. It has become my life's mission to offer my clients what I did receive and all that would have supported me in the best possible ways at that time in my life. 

The journey of trauma recovery has been like a riddle I wanted to solve.. for many years I became my own guinea pig, so that I could share what i learned with you.

Today, this integrated work rests at the foundation of all I do, yet not at the centre. At the centre is creative expression and celebration that is my life. Today, my life is a balance of power, pleasure, and peace. My life today looks (almost) just the way I pictured it as the child with big dreams and a wide open heart..

Thank you for taking the time to read my story.