I’ve been there. In fact, it took me 20+ years to work through the wells of trauma I’d stored deep within me, locked away out of reach from my conscious mind.

I won’t sugarcoat it — my journey wasn’t the easiest. But through a lot of ups and downs, I finally found what worked for me: EFT Tapping. Now, I’m on a mission to help trauma survivors, complex-trauma survivors, and people simply wanting to get a better handle on their emotions learn the tools to navigate emotions and heal trauma with ease, clarity, and confidence.

But that’s skipping to the end of the story. Let me take you back to the beginning of my journey. (Warning — fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.)

Born into Trauma

As with most children who grow up with trauma, I thought my childhood was normal. The emotional and mental abuse, the sexual abuse, the psychological neglect, the alcoholism, the broken bones — these were just the cards I was dealt.

There wasn’t a way out. After all, I didn’t know life could be any other way. So out of necessity, I adapted. I buried my emotions so I could survive. I learned to shift my personality so I could become what the person in front of me wanted me to be. I found this was the best way to improve my odds of avoiding a negative response.

Before I knew what fawning  was, I actually called this aspect of myself that would adapt to match my outer surroundings “chameleon-ing.”

I Learned to Live in Survival Mode.

Growing up, I knew something was wrong with me. I felt… broken. I shut off my emotions and did what I could to forget and ignore my pain, and blend in. I spent most of my late teens and early twenties numbing myself with alcohol and drugs. I tried to pretend I was “normal” and sought love and acceptance in all the wrong places.

I Decided to Take Healing into My Own Hands.

At 21 I tried therapy. Then I quit therapy. Next up — journaling. I wrote about every abuse to “feel and heal.” Cut to me retraumatizing myself over and over again as I dove into the painful details of my trauma, without the tools to move through my emotions to a place of healing and freedom…

By 25 I’d built a thriving career as a general manager of several top-tier nightclubs and bars. I surrounded myself with chaos AKA the only environment I’d ever known. On the outside, people saw me as tough and confident — like I had my shit together.

Inside, I was crumbling. Alcohol, isolation, self-sabotaging all meaningful relationships, abuse from family that never ended — my “healing” had gotten me nowhere, fast.

Getting Diagnosed with C-PTSD

After hitting my lowest of lows, I decided enough was enough. This was not how I wanted to live the rest of my life. I recommitted myself to my healing journey and found a trauma-informed therapist.

The most significant moment in my healing journey came when I asked my therapist for a diagnosis and she told me I had Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD). As I dove into researching everything I could about the experience and signs of C-PTSD, I felt this enormous weight lift off my shoulders. For the first time, I felt seen. The diagnosis of C-PTSD allowed me to name my suffering.  

For the first time, I realized that there wasn’t anything wrong with me. The symptoms I was experiencing were all a part of my trauma response, which was still trying to protect me from the pain in my childhood.  

Finding My Way to Feeling Better.

Even with this newfound lightness in receiving my diagnosis as a complex trauma survivor, the pain of my trauma still lived within me. I wanted freedom from this emotional rollercoaster. I didn’t want to just mentally understand my pain, I wanted to finally release it.

It was only after chancing upon EFT Tapping that I truly was able to begin changing how I felt inside.

Writing and therapy were essential to helping me contextualize my experiences and reactions on a mental level. But it was Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) and tapping, (often overlooked energy healing techniques), that helped me move through and heal my emotions and feel safe on the level of my body, heart, and spirit. 

Falling in Love with EFT Tapping

It’s fair to say I fell hard and fast. I loved how tapping helped foster inner calm and gave me the support I needed to face and move through the toughest moments of my life. I loved learning about the meridian points and the beautiful artistry of Traditional Chinese Medicine .  I loved that EFT Tapping could be adapted to fit so many different purposes — after all, healing isn’t one size fits all.

 I dove into training and received my certification as an EFT practitioner as a part of the Association of EFT Professionals. I wanted to learn everything I could so I could share it with others, and am so grateful to have been able to help my clients use EFT Tapping to fuel their own healing journeys.

Since I began using EFT Tapping, my world has truly changed, in all aspects. I won’t say it was only EFT and tapping — creating a ton of crystal clear boundaries and reshaping my environment, relationships, and life were essential to facilitating my healing. But EFT Tapping certainly was the lynchpin to helping me find my way to feeling better.

EFT and Trauma

One thing I noticed in my journey with EFT Tapping — almost every resource I found said that trauma survivors should not use EFT without a certified practitioner. This was incredibly frustrating to me, as I knew how helpful EFT tapping had been in my own journey in regaining control over my daily emotional landscape.

It’s for this reason that I decided to create courses that give trauma survivors the tools to safely integrate EFT into their lives to deal with daily emotions. If you want to work through traumas, I encourage you to work 1:1 with a practitioner to avoid retraumatizing yourself.

Creating Community for Complex Trauma Survivors

Once I’d begun reclaiming power over my emotional wellbeing, I wanted to share my experiences and bring awareness to C-PTSD so other survivors could find support and not feel so alone. Because while receiving my diagnosis was life-changing, finding resources and support was in no way easy since the DSM (the official classification book for mental disorders) didn’t (and still doesn’t) recognize C-PTSD as a disorder.  

So, I created the Healing and C-PTSD Community, a safe space for C-PTSD survivors to discover they aren’t alone.

The crazy thing is, while I created this community to support others, I’ve found that the love, vulnerability, and support offered in return by so many amazing people also recovering from C-PTSD has helped me heal and grow my own confidence as well.

So to those of you who are here from Healing C-PTSD — thank you. I hope you know how much you’ve inspired me, and how much your support means to me.

My Mission.

Now, I’m on a mission to help people learn to develop the skills and techniques to communicate with their nervous system so they can reclaim power over their emotional landscape.

Whether you’re someone looking to get a better handle on your emotions, a trauma survivor, or a complex trauma survivor — you don’t have to go through this alone. I see you. I feel you. And so do many others.

Looking for support on your healing journey?