Hey!

Like all soul callings in life, my work is driven by my own story.

For 37 years, I was a devout Mormon.

I considered my faith one of my defining personal characteristics. It informed how I viewed the world and my place in it. It guided by sense of morality. It provided me with community. It gave me a map for my relationships and my responsibilities. It influenced my politics. It gave me a sense of meaning and purpose.

But because it was an authoritarian religion, it also gave me a lot of trauma.

Because much of the control in the religion is accomplished through subtle fear and shame indoctrination, my sense of self-worth slowly deteriorated as my membership in the church matured.

I turned to the coping mechanisms of perfectionism, people pleasing, and over-achieving to compensate for my degraded sense of worthiness.

And for a while, it helped.

But shame doesn’t dissipate just because we numb it with our coping mechanisms. It sits in secret, growing with each judgment we add to the fire, clutching our hearts with fear that someone will find out how vile we believe we are.

Before long, I had internalized so many religious shame messages and the inner toxicity had become so great, I found myself in the depths of clinical depression at the end of 2010.

In therapy, I learned that our emotions aren’t the enemy I was taught they were. The anger, the fear, the sadness, the shame…they were all messengers from my inner knowing yearning to educate me about what was hurting me and what would bring me joy.

As I learned to allow myself to fully feel again instead of shoving my emotions down and putting on a happy face, I returned to a healthy relationship with my authentic self. Each time I listened to that woman inside of me, she taught me what I valued, what I wanted, what I craved, and what I actually believed. She showed me where I was out of alignment with who I really am and what I needed to do to correct it.

I began to truly love and value the person inside of me and I began to trust her wisdom. I learned that she knew me better than anyone else and always made choices that would bring me the most happiness and satisfaction in life.

Once I began to anchor into a healthy relationship with myself, I was no longer compatible with controlling individuals or organizations.

Learning to love and trust myself has given me more freedom than I ever could have imagined when I first started this journey 11 years ago.

It allowed me to leave a high demand religion with confidence, create healthier relationships with my husband and children, build authentic friendships, create more fun and excitement in my life, allow myself to really relax for the first time in my life, and finally step into the controversial work I feel called to do with religious trauma.

Shedding religious shame and fear changed my entire life and I want to give that gift to others. I want others to know what it feels like to feel completely free.

Trauma Informed Coaching Certification- 2021
Moving The Human Spirit