My Path Back to Self

Like the rest of you, I am on an unfolding journey of healing, reconnection, and discovering the fullness of who I am and the existence I inhabit.

For much of my life, I didn't understand how deeply the past had shaped me, from personal traumas to inherited narratives about the world and our place in it. Like many people, I had developed ways of understanding myself and moving through the world that allowed me to keep going, meet my responsibilities, and build a life. I was functional and still had moments of joy and connection, but I was cut off from most of my internal experience and feelings. I didn't recognize was how much of my inner experience remained beyond my awareness, and how profoundly old wounds continued to shape my life long after the experiences that caused them.

When I returned from Iraq, I experienced symptoms of post-traumatic stress that I struggled to recognize for what they were. I had a particular image of what PTSD looked like, and I couldn't reconcile that image with my own experience. Even when I was diagnosed, I found ways to minimize what it meant. My struggle didn't really fit the story I had about myself.

Over time, I began to acknowledge the trauma I had experienced in combat. That recognition opened a door I hadn't known was there. As I began to understand how those experiences had affected me, I also came to recognize the trauma I had been carrying since childhood. The two were connected in ways I hadn't understood, and acknowledging one helped me begin to see the other. I had spent years living within a particular understanding of myself, and gradually, that understanding was giving way to something more honest and more complete.

My healing journey has been, in many ways, a process of becoming reacquainted with myself.

It has required more than recognizing what happened to me. It has meant learning to pay attention to my inner life, to recognize patterns I had previously been unable to see, and to make room for feelings and experiences that I had learned, in one way or another, to keep at a distance. I needed to let go of my fear of my inner life. As the protective responses that once helped me get through life began to loosen, I found myself encountering more of my own emotional world: aspects of myself that had been muted, hidden, or difficult to access. It is an ongoing process of understanding, discovery, and change.

One of the most profound lessons has been that the ways we learn to survive can become the very things that keep us from experiencing the fullness of our lives. The stories we tell ourselves about who we are, what we can feel, what we deserve, and what is possible for us may have helped us navigate circumstances we weren't equipped to understand at the time. We don't need to condemn those stories or the parts of ourselves that came to depend on them, but we can learn to look at them with fresh eyes, become curious about what lies beneath them, and make room for them in an integrated self.

This understanding has drawn me toward a way of working that honors the complexity of our inner lives. I am particularly interested in the parts of ourselves that have become disconnected, exiled, or hidden away; the aspects of us that may still carry pain, fear, grief, or unmet needs, even when we have long since moved beyond the circumstances in which those feelings first arose. These parts can lock our emotional lives in our responses to our worst experiences when they are not acknowledged and welcomed. These parts not as problems to be eliminated or overcome, but aspects of ourselves that deserve to be understood and welcomed into a fuller relationship with who we are.

My practice brings together soul retrieval and parts work, informed by approaches including Voice Dialogue, Focusing, and Hakomi and my certifications in soul retrieval, deep release therapy, and Reiki. These methods offer different ways of listening to and engaging with our inner experience. I draw on them intuitively, with a sensitivity to the dynamics unfolding within each person, rather than assuming that everyone needs the same approach or follows the same path.

At the heart of this work is a simple conviction: the parts of ourselves that we hide away hold the key to an integrated and self-accepting inner world. We can turn toward them with curiosity and compassion, begin to understand what they carry, and make room for them within a more connected, balanced, and authentic sense of self.

This process is not about changing who you are but reintroducing you to your whole self. It is a process of reclaiming more of who we already are, discovering possibilities that old wounds have obscured, and learning to inhabit our lives with greater presence, openness, and freedom.

My own journey continues, and I bring that awareness with me into my work. I know how much courage it can take to question the stories that have made us feel safe, how disorienting it can be to encounter parts of ourselves we don't yet understand, and how meaningful it can be to discover that there is more to us than we once knew.

It is a privilege to walk alongside others as they undertake that exploration. To create space for what has been hidden to emerge, for what has been hurting to be met with compassion, and for the many parts of ourselves to find their way back into relationship with the whole is a gift that I am grateful that others are willing to share.