About
Connie
I built this work because I needed it first, and couldn’t find anyone who offered it.
Chapter One
My early life did not give me a soft beginning. By the time I was a teenager, I had already learned what it meant to be failed by the people who were supposed to protect me, and what it costs a young woman when the world offers her very few doors.
II found my way through as so many women have, by surviving. By doing what was available, what kept me alive, what kept me moving. There is no shame in survival. There is only the truth of it: that the tools we build in those years are built for endurance, not for living. And eventually, endurance alone stops being enough.
By my early twenties I had found what many survivors find, that the coping mechanisms that kept you alive begin to take on a life of their own. Alcohol. Drugs. The slow erosion of the self beneath the weight of just getting through.
I was not broken. I was buried. There is a difference, and it took me years to understand it.
In 1988 I got sober. Not gracefully. Not all at once. But I got there — and I stayed.
What followed was eight years of 12-step recovery alongside talk therapy. The rooms of AA gave me something I had never had: a community, an honest accounting of myself, and a structure for living that didn’t require me to numb everything to get through the day. The steps gave me a foundation I did not know I was missing.
1988
Abstinence. The beginning of the foundation.
1988 – 1996
12-step recovery with talk therapy. Eight years of building what had never been built.
Year Nine
A crisis that the program alone could not hold. Suicidal. Diagnosed with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. Medication that finally reached what years of talk therapy hadn’t.
Year Eleven
A somatic therapist. The body finally allowed into the room. DBT and Somatic Experiencing, and the beginning of what would become twenty years of the deepest work.
The somatic work changed everything. For the first time I was not just talking about my experience, I was learning to listen to it, through the body that had been holding it all along. DBT gave me the language. Somatic Experiencing gave me the ground. And somewhere in those twenty years of practice, I began developing something I would eventually call somatic meditation, a way of being in conversation with the self that no one had quite taught me, that I was building from the inside out.
Chapter Two
II
Learning To Recover
Chapter Three
III
Finding the deeper work
Add a compelling There was always a sense that there was more. That the work being offered, as good as it was, stopped somewhere short of where I needed to go.
The resistance didn’t come from the top. It came from the room. Peers in recovery, people walking the same road, who found my process difficult to be around. The anger, the tears, the anxiety, the depression that surfaced as I dug deeper: I was told I was over-emotional. That I was too much. That I needed to settle down and be satisfied with what I had. What I came to understand is that my process was uncomfortable for them, and it was easier to try to stop me than to sit with what my digging was stirring up in themselves.
“I have always been a disruptor. A questioner. Someone who couldn’t conform to the systems I was handed, and was miserable when I tried.”
So I kept going. Into Jung’s conception of the Shadow, those parts of the self that have been pushed into the dark, not because they are evil, but because they were never welcomed into the light. Into the somatic self, the body as its own kind of knowing, with its own language, its own memory, its own wisdom that the talking mind so often overrides.
I began to understand that what I was building was a practice of Self-Dialogue, a way of being in genuine conversation with every part of myself. Not managing the difficult parts. Not performing healing for an audience. Actually meeting myself: the shadow, the body, the emotion, the belief, and learning to listen.
What I discovered, slowly and then unmistakably, is that this is the relationship most of us were never taught to build. We are raised entirely in the direction of others, how to be in relationship with them, how to perform for them, how to survive them. The relationship with the self is treated as optional, as indulgent, as something to get to later. Most people never get to it at all.
That absence is not a personal failing. It is a gap in what we are given. And filling it changes everything, not just the relationship with yourself, but every relationship in your life.
Chapter Four
IV
Becoming
the Crone.
There is a word for the woman who has moved through the maiden and the mother and arrived at the third stage of her life: Crone. It is not an insult. It is an arrival.
The Crone is the woman who has earned her knowing. Who has stopped performing her life for the comfort of others. Who has walked through enough fire to understand that the fire was not punishment, it was refinement. She carries the stories in her body. She has done the work that most people avoid. And she has come out the other side not diminished, but distilled.
I am in that chapter now. And it is from this place, not from a textbook, not from a certification alone, but from a life actually lived and a self actually known, that I offer this work.
I am not here to tell you who to become. I am here to help you hear who you already are.
The formal credentials.
The lived experience is the foundation. These are the formal qualifications built on top of it, each one chosen because it deepened the work, not to fill a resume.
- Master of Science
- Advanced Life Coaching Certification
- NLP Practitioner
- Naturopath Practitioner
- Certified Herbalist
- Kundalini & Practical Reiki Certified
- ULC Spiritual Counselor
- 20+ Years Somatic Practice (DBT & Somatic Experiencing)
- Reiki Healing Association Member
If this story
found you, there’s
a reason.
The work begins with a conversation. No commitment, no performance. Just an honest look at where you are and whether this is the right next step.
Or join the community and begin where you are.
