Notes from Within:
REFLECTIONS ON HEALING, SPIRIT, AND THE BODY
From Hell to Healing: What Transformation Actually Looks Like in Real Life
Healing doesn’t happen in a single breakthrough moment. It shows up quietly — in your breath, your boundaries, your sleep, and your ability to feel safe again. This post explores what real transformation looks like in everyday life, as the nervous system shifts from survival toward grounded, embodied healing.
Say Yes to the Mess: Why Holistic Trauma Therapy Wins in 2026
2026 feels like a threshold year. Not because the calendar changed, but because so many of us are tired of pretending we’re fine while quietly unraveling inside. This reflection explores why holistic, trauma-informed therapy isn’t about fixing or transforming yourself, but about integration, permission, and learning to feel safe enough to be fully human. It’s an invitation to say yes to support, yes to your nervous system, and yes to the slow, honest work of becoming.
Presence Over Performance: A Different Kind of Year‑End Reflection
This is not your average anxiety or trauma therapy holiday blog. You won’t find tips on how to survive family dinners or navigate holiday stress. Because honestly, holidays are tricky for most of us, and sometimes the most legit thing we can do is stop trying to “navigate” them at all.
Instead, I want to offer something different: affirmations. Gentle reminders that being here, being alive, is enough.
The Roundness of Healing: The Soul’s Language
Healing is rarely linear it’s a round, unfolding process of remembering who we are. In this reflection on spiritual integration therapy, Mallory Tedrick, LPCC, explores how the language of the soul can guide trauma healing beyond words. Through somatic awareness, mindfulness, and holistic practices, she invites clients to connect body, mind, and spirit to rediscover meaning after anxiety, depression, or PTSD. This approach to holistic trauma therapy honors both the science of psychology and the mystery of the sacred within.
The Roundedness of Healing: Attuning to Emotion Through Embodied Practice
There’s often that moment in sessions when words begin to falter.
The pauses, the searching for language, and the slumping of the shoulders. The breath shortens and gaze shifts.
And I know: the body is speaking.
I’ve come to trust that the body often knows before the mind does. It holds stories, signals, and truths that language can’t always reach. That’s why embodiment and emotional attunement are central to my integrative approach. They’re not add-ons…they are the bridge.
The Roundedness of Healing: Education as Repair
When clients begin their “healing” journey, many arrive carrying stories or beliefs about themselves that were never fully named, let alone understood. They’ve felt:
“too much” or “too sensitive” or “not enough”
What they didn’t know was that their nervous system was simply doing its best to protect them.
This is where education becomes repair.
The Roundedness of Healing Where Wholeness Begins: My Integrative Foundation in Trauma-Informed Care
We live in a world that often asks us to either compartmentalize or detach. To detach our body from mind, emotion from logic, and healing from daily life.
Pause and allow that to sink in.
Having experienced this large ask myself, I continued to find myself returning repeatedly to the roundedness. The wholeness. The quiet truth that healing is not linear, and it’s never just one thing.
The Quiet Link Between Surrender and Gratitude
Life rarely unfolds exactly as we imagine. When plans shift and outcomes disappoint, surrender can feel like loss — yet it also creates room for gratitude to surface. In this post, I share my own story of sitting with uncertainty and discovering the quiet grace that lives between effort and outcome.
Mental Health and Spirituality: Two Paths, One Journey
Our mental health and spirituality are not separate paths but two threads of the same journey. Mental health provides resilience and safety, while spirituality offers meaning, presence, and hope. Together, they create a foundation for healing and wholeness. When we regulate the nervous system, release trauma, or engage in practices like meditation, prayer, or time in nature, we open the door to deeper connection—with ourselves and with something greater.
From Dread to Delight: A Birthday Reflection on Self-Worth
For years, birthdays felt like a spotlight I didn’t want to stand under. I felt discomfort at the thought of someone wishing me a happy birthday, gifting me a present, or trying to make the day ‘about me.’
The idea of celebrating myself felt uncomfortable, and, upon reflection, even undeserved. My inner critic would say things like:
“I’m nothing special.”
“What is no one else celebrates me.”
“I don’t want the attention.”
Gratitude Without a Script
I used to roll my eyes at gratitude practices
Not because I didn’t believe in them, but because they felt forced. Like one more thing I was supposed to do. So, I’d sit with my journal, staring at prompts that asked me to list three things I was grateful for. And I’d think, Really? This again?
But I kept showing up. Not perfectly. Not enthusiastically. Just consistently enough to notice something: even when I wasn’t writing, I was practicing gratitude. Quietly. Internally. In the way I softened toward myself. In the way I noticed beauty in the mundane. In the way I allowed discomfort to sit beside me without needing to fix it. I never expected to say it, but one day I did…
Welcome: Who I Am, How I Got Here, and Why This Work Matters
I’m not exactly sure what this post will become, but I am trusting that this is the right place to start. So—welcome. It means a lot that you’re reading this.
I’m a Licensed Independent Social Worker and Clinical Psychotherapist, but those words only scratch the surface of who I am and what I do. I work with clients who are ready to go deep—not just into the roots of their anxiety or depression, but into their soul. Into a blueprint they can feel but haven’t yet fully accessed—or perhaps lost touch with along the way.
My work is body-based, trauma-informed, and soul-centered.