My passion and strongest asset is my genuine desire to help others.
My goal is to not only educate and benefit myself, but to learn with intention to influence others to take up their power in healing with a stronger sense of self-love.
In my healing journey, I’ve come to realize that I’ve endured and overcome many challenging and abusive situations within one lifetime.
A series of extreme circumstances and chronic exposure to abuse often prevents people from reaching a position to turn their reactive experience into proactive, preventive care for themselves and others.
Despite the blessing of being adopted early, I was 1 of 6 children split through the Oklahoma DHS foster system based on very serious accounts of abuse. This had a significant impact on my brain’s development and affected every dynamic of my life going forward. It has taken time and self-discovery over and over to realize both the negative AND positive impacts.
Our society and human nature leads us to treat these experiences as if they write our destiny with concrete consequence of minimal hope and much despair.
The lasting effects of early childhood trauma is not prioritized within our education systems, or by medical providers serving us. The mindset of being “stuck” is dangerous. We are not encouraged or educated well in these spaces on how to save ourselves from ourselves in a context we can rationalize.
The rare ACE scoring to evaluate adverse childhood experiences in schools and during intakes with primary care physicians are only early signs of our culture improving to consider trauma in direct connection with ongoing difficult situations and medical diagnoses being faced by many children and adults.
There is hope in healing that goes further than we realize because we’re taught to track and treat symptoms versus to investigate, value or repair the source. Rarely do we start with rewriting the narrative of our story within and of ourselves.
Very quickly and early on in childhood I grew tired of overhearing adults discuss the heinous acts of abuse and neglect and the symptoms defining my abilities based on evidence of others. I decided I won’t let my hardships define me or hold me back – a skill I now understand as resilience and grit.
I grew up without insight into the natural biological aftermath of the things that had happened to me. Naturally, I took emotional responsibility for what started out as “appropriate behaviors/symptoms… considering what I had been through” and later grew into an “irrational response” to normal situations. Trauma-informed guidance was also not given to my caregivers. If anything, abusive practices were promoted such as, “holding therapy.” Something I just recently defined when reading of this outdated strategy within one of my suggested books.
As an adult I’m learning to heal while honoring these behaviors with compassion and curiosity instead of a desire to separate myself from it.
Understanding my brain’s method of survival in correlation with my history caused a monumental shift in my ability to forgive myself and appreciate my mind, body and spirit’s efforts to survive. A gift I believe can be shared as a parent, friend, coworker, and acquaintance – being a safe space for all.
I know my purpose is giving back to people who are struggling to live the life I’ve lived in many different versions. As a former recipient and at times, victim, of the social services in place to protect and assist vulnerable populations – I know too intimately the myriad of struggles and complications working with these systems, even when public servants have honest intentions.
Moving upward on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, you achieve more cognitive capacity for choice, regardless of the life circumstances you’ve been dealt.
One of my many goals is to help people recognize that survival, even while feeling trapped within those lower levels of the Hierarchy, is still a success.
I wish to provide positive support to those working to move through these stages towards self-actualization by planting seeds of opportunity to analyze these situations differently to encourage personal growth.
I am skilled at providing compassionate and noteworthy insight for those ready to challenge themselves and progress on their journey. I am not a certified professional, however, the experience I’ve gained over my lifetime is untrainable and I am in progress to further my education and obtain my bachelors degree in Sociology – Human Services.
So, if you’re hurting – hang around and give yourself the safe space to exist and examine new ways of thinking.
Like parenthood, I’ve realized you’re never ready for life and can’t plan it into perfection. In other words, stop waiting until you reach a certain milestone or achieve a certain goal to try something new and healthy.
All I can do is show up and start trying as I am, and over time, even if only through ripple effects of sharing content and referring or offering services to provide necessary support, I know this will grow bigger than me and have monumental positive and meaningful impact to some of the most vulnerable populations.
As you can tell, I’m not cut out for niceties of pretending to always have it together.
It has been a struggle to learn to admit that things are hard.
To tell my truths while maintaining a sense of pride rather than shame.
To learn how to perform self-care and dedicate as much time to that as I used to spend trying to convince others of my worth.
In many ways, this is just one avenue of me opening up and sharing my journey of healing and transformation in hopes it helps someone else sort through the chaos in their heart and come out capable of propelling others upward on the way.
