About Me

This is the real version, not the polished one.

It begins with a relationship that wasn’t healthy, but was very much part of my awakening. When it ended abruptly and traumatically, I didn’t handle it well. I was with someone else within weeks and moved from Virginia to California two months later. I got pregnant almost immediately, and what was left of that relationship, which barely survived past the Rocky Mountains, was pretty much over… though he wouldn’t tell me for another five months, when he found someone else and brought her to live with us.

I was lied to. Manipulated. Demonized. Eventually his own friends woke up to what was happening and helped me get out. I moved home six months pregnant, preparing for solo motherhood with the support of my family.

I ended up having a traumatic birth. I had been so caught up in the chaos of my life that I had stopped listening to my body entirely, and my body paid for it. Recovery was long, painful, and lonely. I was ready to share my son with the world, and the world shut down.

A year later I was forced to file for custody and began preparing to be in a courtroom with the most triggering person in my life. I started working with a therapist with one intention: don’t lose my shit in the court room, jeopardizing my son.

What happened instead changed everything.

I ended up diving deep into my childhood attachment wounds, uncovering threads and patterns woven through every relationship I’d ever had. Something unexpected began to happen: the more I healed the root of those patterns, the more clarity and control I gained over myself, my emotions, my reactions, my triggers. And as I gained that control over my life, he faded out of it. The less he could manipulate me, the less power he had, so he stopped communicating with his lawyer, he stopped communicating with mine, and he never showed up to court.

He knew he couldn’t reach me anymore.

When I walked out of that courtroom with everything I had asked for, I didn’t feel triumphant. My best friend looked at me and said “you don’t look happy.” And I wasn’t… I felt grief for what my son wouldn’t have, guilt for not being able to make it work, and sorrow for the new family he had left in his wake too. It took me a full year to truly own what I had done, to feel empowered enough to enforce it, to stop apologizing for healing myself so completely that he no longer had a foothold.

At the same time, my body was screaming.

I was having episodes of pain so severe my body would go into overload and be close to losing consciousness on the bathroom floor, I found no answers from any doctor who saw me.

I turned to my Mercier therapist. Instead of any physical manipulation in the area of pain, she led me somewhere I had never been — deep inside my body, to meet the pain directly.

I sat with it. I felt it. I listened to it. She led me into relationship with it.

What I found there was not a medical condition. It was my own self-hatred. My self-blame. The anger and rage I had been storing in my body toward myself for ignoring every signal, every whisper, every knowing I had within. I knew I deserved better and I struggled to forgive myself for not acting like it.

That was my first somatic healing experience.

It cracked me open. It led me into deep reverence for my body for what it had survived, what it had held, what it had been trying to tell me all along. The episodes stopped. And when the next layer of trauma surfaced two years later, I moved through it with awareness instead of terror.