I have had a dysregulated nervous system and significant fear most of my life, secondary to early childhood trauma - both big “T” and little “t”.  It was through the lens of fear that I experienced myself and the world, both of which always seemed very unsafe places to be.

As a result, my strategies for finding safety, which were quite dysfunctional, started early in life.  I developed an eating disorder in my late teens as a way to find safety through control. When this didn’t work I resorted to substances in my twenties in another desperate attempt to numb my overwhelming experience of life.  This strategy also failed miserably, and in my late twenties I redirected the energy of my struggle to helping others (i.e. “wounded healer”) and became an allopathic physician (while subconsciously using distraction and control through workaholism, perfectionism, and achievement). I completed medical school/residency and became a comprehensive ophthalmologist and surgeon in 2005.  

Unfortunately, after only a few years in this overworked, misaligned healing profession, I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia in 2009. Eventually, after continued misaligned living, workaholism, poor boundaries, and the added responsibility of having a child (who is now a teen), I had to leave my career in 2015 totally disabled. Over time my new strategy for finding safety became fixing myself, and I spent years going from doctor to doctor and protocol to protocol, all the while developing more health problems and less function over time.  By 2018 I was house-bound and mostly bed-bound with very little will to live my small, painful, isolated life.  Luckily, I eventually found self-directed neuroplasticity in 2020, initially through DNRS, and then joined Primal Trust in the spring of 2021.  

As my nervous system became more regulated through nervous system work, and I grew my capacity for suppressed emotions, I started to feel more embodied.  I also grew more capacity to access deeper layers of wounding, which were not previously accessible. In 2023 I started following Simona Irwin’s teachings regarding befriending emotions, including fear (have completed befriending fear multiple times).  I also started regularly attending Simona’s embodied mindfulness classes. In these classes I learned even more intimately how our system keeps us stuck in physical symptoms and relational conflict to avoid processing suppressed emotions.  These classes gave me a container to be with my emotions somatically in a titrated supportive way.  They also helped me continue to question, through inquiry, whether the beliefs creating the emotions were even true. In addition, the practices provided a corrective experience, and helped me grow my capacity for emotional processing even more than was previously possible.  I now know that questioning my beliefs and somatically processing suppressed emotions is the real work being asked of me. 

Finally, it is through all of these experiences that I have developed a passion for the journey of  transformation, and I have now been called to help others who find themselves on a similar path.  As they say, the hero/heroine returns from the long journey with a gift to share. I look forward to the opportunity to share that gift here.

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