I’ve been suffering from depression and anxiety cyclically since I was a child. I’ve always been ashamed of it and I’ve always hidden it very well. I was raised to believe that negative emotions were symbolic of powerlessness and weakness and that they only led you into more trouble. So I was determined to embody strength and positivity no matter what suffering I endured, which funnily enough ended up being the bedrock of my later mental crisis and emotional burnout.
Around the age of 17, I began to lean on spirituality when the waves of depression or anxiety approached as if it was a life-saving buoy keeping me afloat through the storms.
In 2019, I was hit by one of these waves—it was heavy, sending me into a prolonged dark night of the soul and existential crisis. Despite all the meditation, clean eating, conscious living, cutting off toxic people and bad habits, and not to mention being exceptionally spiritually disciplined, here was all that darkness and pain again—this time, even louder, stronger and bolder than before.
I could no longer avoid the fact that I was suffering at a DEEP level.
Spirituality was my life-saving flotation device, yes. But I was barely keeping my head above water and I couldn't keep living like this.
So after more than a decade and a half of mindfulness, positivity, self-discipline and pretending to be ok, I decided to try something I'd always overlooked: therapy. But not with just any ol’ therapist, I started working with a trauma-informed practitioner.
I cried through almost every session we had during the year I worked with her. It was exhausting but it was necessary. I hadn't realised how much I needed another human to hold space for me to simply exist in my sadness, my grief, my resentments and my rage. I hadn't realised that I needed someone to witness my emotions with radical acceptance and total non-judgment in a container of safety. Looking back, it was one of the most spiritually loving things I have ever done for myself… despite the process feeling like utter shit.
The act of investing my time, energy and a lot of money into long-term, co-regulative inner healing was a self-loving commitment that also catalysed a HUGE transformational process within me.
Spiritual practices and therapies were brilliant at helping me cope with my pain and constantly directed me toward where that pain existed. They were brilliant at helping me find strength, safety and hope when I needed it. They were brilliant at helping me survive. BUT. And it’s a big BUT:
When you experience consistent underlying pain or suffering, spiritual practices and therapies are ultimately SHORT-TERM INTERVENTIONS that temporarily soothe the SYMPTOMS of deep-rooted trauma.
Once I began to accept where I was at and what I was feeling and once I let myself SINK into embodying the painful emotions inside me without deflection, guilt or self-shaming (which is extremely important), I realised the emotions wanted to take me somewhere. They wanted to take me to the spaces of disconnection or misalignment within my being.
This was when the real spiritual journey of healing began for me.
Now don’t get me wrong, I love spiritually aligned practices. They are pretty foundational to my life! But it’s been crucial for me to make a clear distinction between SURVIVING with pain and PROCESSING and INTEGRATING pain.
Processing and integrating pain requires our undivided attention, full awareness, courage, vulnerability and a container of safety with preferably a qualified person who can support us through the process of witnessing, integrating and gathering deeper wisdom.
This can’t exactly be achieved whilst meditating or being mindful. Why? Because to process pain requires us to return to its primal emotional expression, embody it, and allow it to move through and eventually OUT of our nervous system. It can be a highly activated state of intense emotional outburst. And when working with a trauma-sensitive practitioner you are able to enter a safe and controlled environment to move through these activated states.
This 3-year-long transformational voyage of exploring my emotions, feelings and somatic sensations with that therapist, and now my current trauma-informed coach (who I don't know how I would be getting through reality without right now tbh) has led me into a new space within my being and equally within my work. It is a space that I approach with caution and humility because it’s one that invites us into an exploration of very uncharted territory: the void.
From exactly this space, a higher aspect of myself began pushing me to be more than just an energy reader and channeller (check out my work on YouTube). I have been pushed to show up as more, to get much more specific, to stop being vague about what I do and how I serve, and to commit to embodying a role I’ve more or less already been in but have been too scared to identify as.
And so with that, I'm proud to finally introduce myself as a trauma-sensitive spiritual coach.
If we’ve already worked together, you’ll maybe sense that this is what I’ve already been doing on many levels, but with my newfound clarity and by acquiring the necessary skills, knowledge and qualifications to ensure an environment of safety within sessions, you can expect a slight pivot to my approach.
If you feel a twang of resonance with my words and experience and are interested in discovering yourself and greater depths, book a free discovery call with me—we can have a chat about where you’re at, what you’re looking for and what we can expect from working with each other if that's the path you choose to take.
Here’s what you can expect from sessions with me:
A space to be held, witnessed and supported as you process whatever life is throwing at you
A relationship where safety, acceptance and non-judgement are at the forefront of every conversation
Collaborative conversations where authenticity, vulnerability and honesty are encouraged
A trauma-sensitive approach combined with spiritual coaching and mentoring to provoke deep self-reflection, higher-self intelligence and greater awareness
Body-oriented/somatic check-ins to assist you in identifying, processing and discharging emotions
A space for powerful questions to trigger you into uncovering the answers that already exist within your being
Here’s what not to expect:
Future predictive energy readings
That what you're processing can be resolved in just 1 session! The real work happens INBETWEEN sessions and after trust within our relationship has been established so that vulnerable expression may surface