My Story

Three decades of apprenticing with personal and systemic trauma were followed by three more decades of trauma study. Along the way, I found trauma wisdom keepers and blended their graciously shared skills into my own. The journey mended and sustained me. Gradually, I grew from personal trauma into seeing systemic trauma, my own and that of the people who find me. By now I have supported those who found my work –– in person and remote –– in Germany, Romania, France, Colorado, Utah, Washington State, Canada, Ute Mountain Ute Nation, California, Kuwait, and Australia.

Three decades with clients, interdisciplinary studies in Social Sciences and Human Services (2010-2014), a Masters in Theological Studies (2015-2017), and a foray into Social Science doctoral studies, a longing developed for a commons where the effects of trauma are de-pathologized, engaged with kindness, usefully c0-suffered, and withnessed. A being with another unbounded by psychiatric categories, politicized turf wars, the commodification of human suffering, and the lure of spiritual coopting.

I deeply resonate  with Annie G. Rogers, a child psychiatrist and professor of clinical psychology at Hampshire College, who writes,

Trauma is bigger than expertise of any sort—it’s in our midst, in our language, our wars, even the ways we try to love, repeating, repeating. No one is an expert on trauma.

Rogers, Annie G., 2006. The Unsayable. The Hidden Language of Trauma/ Random House. Kindle Edition.

what I do

In individual, couples, experiential group, and professional team consultations I use systemic constellating to make fragmentation visible – internal parts, as well as the systems my clients and their issues belong to. Be it the day-to-day, like clarifying troubles at work, or painfully iterative fractals in family, lineage, or historical context, systemic representation illuminates unseen phenomena and opens access to change.

The traumatization of bodies is nested in all of the above. it occurs at the intersection of human embodiment and socio-historical, generational, economic, psychological, and other influences. Some or all of these parameters affect the BodySelf which adapts with age-available survival strategies.

In the process, an array of innate survival strategies arises to meet and survive contextual dynamics. I named these strategies ‘Little Persons‘. They are unique to the context in which an individual comes up. As I would with a little person, I approach these protective adaptations as powerful (albeit immature) agents, bent on helping the maturing BodySelf to make it through.

When threatened or overwhelmed, Little Persons tend to hijack their grown BodySelf into reactive decisions and behaviors. Alas, these are often as outdated as inadequate and unquestioned loyalties to our forbears.

Systemic processing tenets of exclusion, unbalanced give and take, perpetrator and protector parts, preverbal and unformed parts, earlier and later parts, hiding and postering parts, numb little ones, and fire spying dragons show up, quite like gradually emerging representatives in a floor constellation.

The process of presencing, relational re-orienting, and safe enough including a client’s Little Persons into increasing holeness is fostered by a tenderly paced, egalitarian albeit boundaried dialogue.