So much of what inhibits our ability to have healthy relationships and deeper meaning and joy in our life is due to the amount of energy we spend hiding what’s “wrong” with us.

All of us, each and every day, are always telling a story about ourselves in our heads. These stories have originated in our past and make us who we are—holding sway over our lives— controlling our choices, behaviors, and relationships.

Much of the work of healing from trauma involves identifying and deconstructing the internalized distortions about self and narrative, peeling back the layers of commitment and loyalty to these distortions, and integrating fragmented parts of self (mind, body, spirit) in order to reconstruct a truer sense of yourself, your story, and your agency in the world.

My work with clients often involves the deconstruction of survival strategies, negative thinking, and behavior patterns that may have once served to protect them and keep them safe, but are now no longer needed. In the process, we bless those strategies, and the reasons they were needed, and then work to reconstruct new ways of being and relating that are more true to who they are, who they were created to be, and who they are becoming.

It’s the idea that unwanted behavior and thinking, difficulty in relationships, anxiety, addiction, etc. are a result of interruptions in a person’s sense of safety in the world, a sense of self as a creative agent in their life and in their community, and/or shame scripts set in motion by ruptures in attachment, abuse, grief, loss, betrayal (types of traumas). In short, trauma interrupts our capacity to love and be loved. 

The beauty of my own story work has shown me that the most we have to offer to one another is our transformed and transforming presence. It’s not so much about what we do, but who we are that seems to be the agent of transformation.

Healing happens as we are able to find care, acceptance, and affirmation for who we are, where we’ve been so that we can do the hard work of uncovering distortions, understanding our thinking and behaving, and working through stuck points, grief, abuse, or trauma.

I am something new today; a licensed mental health associate. Titled. Official. Credentialed. And yet, still me. Still Amy Anne. Still a daughter, sister, mother, friend, healer, follower of Jesus.