Transmuting Trauma into Community Care

A spiral of shame, bad relationships, and mental health dips was my “norm” for so long, I didn’t even realize how heavy it was. In early adolescence, anxiety and depression came in waves that became so familiar that I thought they were just part of me. As I got older, understanding my own sexuality felt even more tangled and distressing. I’d been taught to “save myself” for someone special, but when my first sexual experience was an assault, all that “purity” I was supposed to maintain felt destroyed. I felt like a popped balloon, left to pick up all the pieces alone.

For years, I cycled between extremes – one, an over-sexualized sex kitten persona, and the other, disconnected from my body and frozen when touched. Alcohol became my ease for social situations, masking the fear and shame and perpetuating a wild, carefree act. But, it also had me avoiding all my deeper feelings, which came out unhinged, argumentative, and angry at men who got close. The charming few who broke through my walls often were the ones who were best at manipulation, and ended up treating me poorly (at best) or abusing (at worst). 

Searching for solutions, I dove into psychology and gender studies in college, and laser-focused on learning how relationships, trauma, sexuality, identity, and healing all intersected. I launched Slutty Girl Problems to speak freely about exploring my sexuality and navigating shame, hoping to find mirrors, words, and community that would help my healing, too. said, you can heal, too. I went to therapy, read books, and filled my mind with theory, yet still struggled to put together the pieces to truly feel whole.

Despite my best efforts, I still found myself in abusive relationships left me shattered, with gaslighting that shredded my self-trust, actions that severed my self-esteem, and words that told me it was all my fault. I wanted so badly to prove it wrong. I thought, if only I could be better, if I wasn’t so worthless and broken, then I would be worthy of being loved. Those internalized messages became so loud that depression and self-hate took root until I began to question if I even deserved to live. I had spent years running from so much pain, all while trying to be my best self, and I had barely made tangible progress. I still didn’t feel happy in my own skin. I wanted to escape from the horror of being myself.

I needed to find my way out of this painful cycle, but had no idea where to begin. Despite all the tools I’d collected, endless studying, and a decade of therapy, I kept falling into the same traps. I had spent hundreds of hours reading about communication, healthy relationships, and dating red flags, and the science of relationships, attraction, and power, but I hadn’t gotten to the root of fear, shame, and self-worth patterns that seemed to be keeping me stuck.

It was only once I brought structure to those tools – working with a coach to actually apply what I had learned, ground myself with somatic practices, and be held with accountability as I rewrote my reality – that things started to shift, fast.

In just a few months, the fog began lifting. I learned to spot my patterns in real-time, soothe my nervous system, and step away from situations that were causing me harm. I learned to communicate my needs, set healthy boundaries, and raise my standards so that I wouldn’t get trapped again. I cultivated a much deeper sense of self-love, worth, resilience, and pleasure, with a newfound sense of calm and ease that I didn’t think possible.

I felt so deeply transformed that I knew I wanted to help others cross these thresholds into a new sense of life. Becoming a coach felt like a natural extension of everything I’d fought through, and my innate calling to help others. I wanted to build something meaningful from the wreckage, and offer others the kind of grounded, practical, heart-centered support I had so desperately needed for so many years. I took all the knowledge I’d applied, and the skills I used to do so, to start coaching people through nervous system regulation, boundaries, relationships, trauma healing, and reclaiming their worth and pleasure, through a lens of compassion and lived experience.

I knew the internal tug-of-war between wanting love and not knowing how to let go when the actions didn’t show it. I knew how lonely and confusing it felt to break a trauma bond. I knew how shame could get trapped in the body and silence your voice. My work became rooted in honoring those wounds without letting them define the future. I guided folks through communication work, embodiment tools, emotional resilience, grief, sexual self-expression, and reconnecting to the body as a site of safety and joy again.

And yet, no matter how much we learn, life can still throw a curve ball with new experiences to navigate and test your somatic skills with.

Years into my coaching work, after needing to detox from birth control for my overall health, I faced new waves of grief, fear, and shame with my own pregnancies. First, two abortions that came with a mix of grief, loneliness, anger, and relief all at once. Then, a very joyfully wanted pregnancy I was thrilled to welcome into the world, that ended up a life-threatening ectopic. The sense of grief and loss, and the fear for my reproductive future and fertility, that went deeper than I could have imagined.

Moving through such emotional, painful moments was a stark contrast to the medical system I faced them in, which felt so clinical, distant, dissociated, and cold. Care only focused on getting through the procedures, not holding space for the emotional, embodied experience of it. Even as I lost my deeply wanted pregnancy, my tears seemed met with vacant stares and empty words that everything would be okay, I could just “try again”.

I realized how, even in our most primal moments of pain, there was no soft place to land and be held in our humanness, and even less resources for queer and trans parents, BIPOC, sex workers, polyamorous families, and those navigating pregnancy and medical decisions amidst a history of sexual assault, intimate partner violence, or medical trauma.

That’s what pulled me deeper into birthwork.

I became an abortion doula first, certified through the Colorado Doula Project, because I knew how it felt to navigate big decisions and conflicting feelings without enough support. Abortion care felt like the clearest way I could provide immediate support, not just because it’s urgent and politicized, but because I wanted to offer something steadier to hold onto amid all the mess and complexity.

Now, I’m deep in my postpartum doula training with Birthing Advocacy Doula Trainings (BADT), with their full-spectrum doula certification up next. For me, this work doesn’t start or end at a single event. It’s walking alongside someone through a journey of becoming. Reproductive and pregnancy care is not just about the decision or the birth, but the transformation of our bodies and identities as we integrate our experience. It’s coming into even more intimate layers of ourself, and holding our grief, joy, chaos, exhaustion, rage, and rebirth as our identity shifts and reorients into a new phase.

I became a doula not just to hold you through the unknown (though I do that too), but to offer clear, practical, liberatory care, especially for those who are often overlooked in the medical system. Queer and trans folks, young parents, BIPOC parents, survivors, disabled people, people living in poverty, those navigating pregnancy or parenting without a sense of safety or support. My support isn’t a one-size-fits-all checklist. It’s dynamic, deeply customized, and rooted in body-based, trauma-informed care.

My doula practice is built on the belief that our bodies carry both our wounds and our wisdom, and that healing is nonlinear. Transformation doesn’t always look like a perfect arc, but more like a spiral that regresses and flickers before it roars. It’s also deeply personal, and draws from somatics, survivor wisdom, reproductive justice, queer theory, and a lifetime of crawling back into myself.

I knew early on that I didn’t want to offer surface-level support. I wanted to bring the deepest level of trauma-informed care to my work as I could, especially for folks who’d been let down by the system over and over again. Somatic therapy had transformed my own healing in a way that talk therapy failed to touch, because trauma doesn’t just live in our thoughts, it lives in the body. So healing has to happen there too. I knew I wanted to bring somatic trauma resolution skills into my care., so I also began the years-long training to become a certified Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, rooted in healing that reaches the deepest layers of our nervous system. To feel really whole.  

Combined, the modalities I’ve immersed myself in are not just about healing care. It’s about turning toward yourself when everything in the world tells you to turn away. It’s about naming what you need, without having to perform or make it palatable.

If you’re here, maybe you’re walking through a big shift, or grieving what’s been lost. Maybe you’re tired of being the strong one, or pretending everything’s okay. Maybe you’re untangling old survival strategies, or maybe you’re just ready to be witnessed in your own messy, radiant becoming.

Whatever brings you here, I’m glad you found your way.

You deserve care that doesn’t flinch when things get real. And I feel honored to walk with you.

→ If you’re curious about working together—whether for coaching, doula support, or something in-between—you can explore more here.