When I was 4 years old, I decided to be a healer. Granted, at 4 I thought it meant I would be a kindergarten teacher. I wanted to teach people how to be happy.
I was looking at the toilet bowl in my babysitter’s run down trailer in the Chicago suburbs.
I had just kissed the head of an adult man’s penis. It smelled like stinky socks. I was probably in shock.
He left a chocolate sandwich cookie on the bathroom sink, I think, for not crying. And here I stood, a lost little girl with big green eyes, looking at the rusty water like a crystal ball.
45 years later, I call myself a Trusted Relationship Advisor and Creativity Coach. It still means I teach the fundamentals of family, relationships and money in a fun way.
A few years after the bathroom incident, my big brother died after being handicapped most his life.
My beautiful mom and dad got us through some dark times and my sister and I turned out pretty great after all. We were blessed to have such ingenious and resourceful parents.
However, after coping with heavy stress most my life, I felt like a misunderstood, naturally high strung woman who was good at helping people and figuring things out.
Living the dream.
That is, until my intestines blew up, I was angry all the time and started vomiting every day for a year. The doctor called it IBS and gave me some pills.
Like a perfect Red Delicious Apple with a worm. I looked good on the outside but felt rotten on the inside.
I felt like a healer with a secret life. An imposter.
My relationships were rocky. I didn’t like my family. My business was losing money. I was lonely and didn’t have any close friends. I didn’t really trust anyone, actually.
And I usually felt sick, even slightly queasy.
My IBS told me I had problems, but I didn’t know what to do. So I took the next, logical step and started to learn how to heal myself.
18 years later, I’d studied shiatsu massage, shamanism, hands on healing, herbal medicines, self-hypnosis, essential oils, meditation, and sound healing and ran a professional healing practice for over 14 years.
On the Western Medicine side, I’d been in and out of therapy since I was in my 20’s. I had gone through CODA and Al-Anon. Antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds. I had a BS in Education and MA in Personal Transformation.
I’d also worked in sacred medicines and led women’s Sacred Talking Circles and sweat lodges. I was married to my college sweetheart and had helped thousands of women heal from sexual trauma. I had a very good life.
The secret was I still woke up angry, depressed, my stomach on fire and my skin crawling. Only now, can I say it felt like hell. I usually didn’t get my act together until noon. Half a day wasted. Every. Day.
“What was that sound? Is today a bad day? Why am I so sad?”. Every morning I buried it just like I did as a kid, dragged myself out of bed and went out to spread love and light.
I was sick of feeling sick.
Sick of wasting my life.
A lifetime of healing and I had nothing to show for it. Nothing worked, nothing changed.
I was still crying almost every day, putting on a happy face and helping other women deal with incest, domestic violence and emotional abuse.
Kind of a nightmare. There are good reasons therapists have a high suicide rate.
But after surviving more than 2 big childhood traumas, I knew I wasn’t going to go down with the ship. There was no way I was going to keep being a wounded healer who secretly hated her life until stress finally killed me.
So I went deeper into the science of trauma, things they didn’t know when I was a kid. I found out that when I put the research together with all the healing work I do, my clients (and I) started to see big changes in our relationships, our family and our money really fast. Like in 2-3 weeks fast.
It seems, all the rituals and essential oils and women’s circles weren’t working faster because when you’re stressed, your nervous system crashes. You have to take time to relax and flip your nervous system back on before you can get anything done.
When your body is yelling at you, it’s called “emotionally hijacking” and all you know is that life kinda sucks.
Maybe you eat a whole bag of pretzels. Or yell at the dog. Or humiliate your kids.
Sometimes you cry a lot or you don’t really like sex. Or you keep dating crappy guys who can’t get their life together.
Whatever your “issue” is, it means you’re stressed. Your body is yelling at you to get a massage, make a cup of tea or walk in the woods. But like most women, you keep putting it off until you “deserve” it.
So you get stuck taking 2 steps forward, 1 step back, all the time.
Before my healing work, I wouldn’t let anybody get to know me. I’d ask questions and people would talk about themselves. People liked me but I was really lonely.
After my healing work, I decided to be an author, a tedx speaker… I stopped giving away my time to other people and feel good about myself and aligned with my future.
I am a successful woman who has a successful life.
I set boundaries. I charge what I’m worth. I stand up for myself. I yell back. My intestines work great. I meditate and I feel God every moment of every day.
You can teach your body to let go of the anger. To feed yourself more love. And most importantly, how to hack your nervous system, have friends who nurture you and put yourself first.
This is the shortcut that avoids 30 years of therapy appointments.
With the right support, your life changes overnight. Especially if you were told, “people never change” or “healing takes a long time”. Honestly, from what we know now about how the body works, whatever you think you “can” and “can’t do” is made up.
If you want to finish your thesis, stop getting mad or feeling lonely, wasting your life feeling sick and tired, click this link and set up a free 30 minute call and see if it’s the right time to shift your life.
Because Life can be WAY better than you imagined. Take it from me, a multiple trauma survivor turned spiritual healer.
Because when everything blows up, you get to put the pieces back together any way you want.