RESONANCE HEALING COLLECTIVE

​My start in therapy came after my life collapsed. Not in a tragic, externally disastrous, blow-up-your-life kind of way. More in the way where your professional life continues, and all the people and things that depend on you don't notice while you quietly fall apart inside. I had managed to make my life look incredibly successful while, inside, I was shattered into tiny, sharp little pieces.​ I couldn't really put my finger on what the problem was in my relationships. At best, I had always assumed I was the kind of person who never got close enough to matter to anyone. At worst, I was terrified of being the person who, if you knew them deeply enough, you'd eventually find the ugly thing that made everyone else leave. Over time, I'd surrounded myself with people who seemed to reflect that belief back to me. My romantic relationships were lonely and humiliating. I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong to keep arriving at the same painful, predictable ending. It all felt so fateful that I hadn't really considered that something different might exist for me. ​I came to therapy hoping to learn how to become the kind of person people would choose, and choose to stay for. I wanted to discover whatever it was that made other people so desirable, so worth keeping. And, underneath that, I wanted to find whatever it was that other people seemed to have that made them feel like actual people. ​I didn't really feel human. I felt more like a collection of interests, beliefs, and idiosyncrasies I'd picked up from people I'd loved or envied. I had learned how to become pieces of the people around me, but I didn't know how to feel like a whole person of my own. ​I started with self-help manuals and YouTube videos. I saw my problems as personal moral failings: things I foolishly kept getting wrong that other people seemed to know instinctively. Like other people were born with bones and I was born with good intentions. Sometimes I wasn't even sure about that much. As my upbringing had set me up to do, I began healing completely alone, focusing on everything that could be wrong with me. I was cold. I was selfish. I attached too quickly, believed too naively, stayed too long, gave myself up too easily, avoided people I cared about, talked myself out of things I wanted, and ended up confused too often to be as smart as people seemed to think I was.​ No one actually knew me. And I couldn't even blame them for it, because I didn't know myself either.​ A friend eventually suggested that I meet with a counsellor to talk about what was going on for me. I was bewildered. I didn't think my problems warranted that level of intervention. My mom had died when I was a kid, and when the topic of therapy came up in my family, I was told it was for people who were truly and irredeemably fucked up. I never asked what that meant, but I knew I would probably never become the kind of fucked up they were talking about.​ I did it, reluctantly, and with a little worry that the counsellor would see me as some kind of secret emotional vampire: there to complain about self-made problems in a life most people would envy. A pretty, grating, oversensitive mess who mostly just needed to get over herself. ​I was so desperate to be somewhere else internally that I braced myself to sit in front of someone I believed could see straight into my thoughts and feelings, like an aquarium, judging each one for being a crustacean when the tank was meant for goldfish.​ The first session was a total train wreck. My voice, just like my thoughts, were everywhere and nowhere all at once. That familiar tension welled up inside me, the kind that always seemed to accompany my attempts to be honest. ​I felt like I was floating under the ceiling, watching myself on the couch, throwing up emotions both fermented and volcanic. To the therapist, I probably just looked like someone who didn't know when to shut up.​ I could have run out of that office. Instead, I found myself near the end of the session telling her about a memory from when I was 12 years old. Until that moment, I probably hadn't thought about it once in over a decade.​ Why was I telling this woman about something so trivial? What did that have to do with anything? Why was I like this?​ Her eyebrows furrowed. She told me she was sorry that that had happened to me. She said something to me about shame, which was the first time I'd heard that word applied to an emotional experience rather than a kind of person.​ I left the office feeling uncomfortably lighter and exposed. It felt like I'd dug down to the bottom of my pants pockets and wrung out the lint and garbage into a little pile on the therapist's floor before I left. I told myself I'd never go back.​ But I kept going.​ The years that followed introduced me to words like emotional regulation, positive self-talk, radical acceptance, and boundaries. Later came attachment styles, trauma bonding versus healthy intimacy, family dysfunction, and childhood emotional neglect.​ Sometimes I'd try bringing some of the stuff I was learning to my family. I always ended up walking away from those conversations confused and frustrated that they never seemed to "get it," no matter how hard I tried to explain it properly. ​I still wasn't entirely convinced I came from the kind of family you'd need to recover from. But the therapy was working for me, so I kept going, despite the nagging worry that someone with “real trauma” would eventually find me out. ​I kept up my scouring of therapy content on YouTube, this time with a kinder acceptance of how nice it felt to still figure some things out on my own. I started meeting healthier people, and eventually I came across people who were also privately investigating their own childhoods. I discovered Patrick Teahan and RRP. ​I started getting real about my family. About the choices the adults were making around me as I grew up. About the kinds of behaviour that were excused and normalized. About the responsibilities handed to women, to children, or to anyone except the person to whom the responsibility actually belonged. About the things that had been said to me, and the things that should have been said but never were. Things like "that's on me," and "I'm sorry." I started getting angry. Really. Really. Angry.​ First, at my self-centred, alcoholic father. Then at my enabling (also selfish), co-dependent mother. I got angry that they put their child through a messy divorce only to choose each other again in their next toxic partner. I got angry at a roomful of adults who did nothing while a child traded in parts of herself in hopes for a passing moment of recognition or safety.​ How could you do that to her? How could you let that happen?​ I finally saw her. I saw the victim my child self had fought so hard, her whole life, not to be. I grieved for the perfectly normal, perfectly lovable child who spent years feeling confused and inadequate while the people she trusted to love her continued to hurt her, take from her, lie to her, and let her down. ​I saw that all she really needed to be “better” this whole time was to have been treated better when it mattered.​ That little girl became real enough to me that I could see the places I wasn't present or protective of her in my adult life. Over time, I made some hard choices that taught me I could trust myself to do the right thing by her more often than not. I don't talk to family anymore. Not because of who they were when I was a kid, but because of who they choose to continue to be today. I see myself as someone undeserving of poor behaviour and I protect myself from the role I played in keeping draining relationships going. For some of them, my website is the only way they get to see me. They may even feel personally confronted reading this right now. ​ My quest for wholeness has led me to become a specialist in childhood trauma recovery. The kind who, according to my family, only works with people who are truly, irredeemably fucked up. I help them heal and get better.​ I help them believe in their bones that the only thing fucked up about them is what happened to them growing up. I help them grieve it deeply enough that they can become present in their adult lives. Then I help them embody the kind of adult their child self needed growing up.