I have always been interested in relationships and conflict resolution. I started my on-the-job training as a peacekeeper between my parents and siblings when I was still in elementary school. Turned out that my family of origin was the perfect setting to learn about difficult behaviors, relationship challenges, and the pain that comes from relationships without enough support to resolve complex problems. In my teens, I saw firsthand what bad therapy can do when the solutions don’t consider the whole family system and pathologize individuals within the system. It’s like not seeing the forest for the trees! My family therapy experiences were quite painful, and they caused a lot of harm for me personally. After that, I hated the idea of being a therapist so much that when it came up on my high school career inventory as the #1 career path for me, I said no and went to school to become a teacher. I got a teaching degree, got married, and moved from Indiana to sunny Florida.
The universe laughed.
I disliked being a classroom teacher. I liked the kids, but funny enough, I loved working with the parents. While all my colleagues hated conferences, I looked forward to being able to talk to parents about their child. But I didn’t love the industrial education model and got in trouble quite a bit as a teacher because I did things like make sure my students got recess every day. I didn’t win friends there. I may have been having some relationship challenges when a friend strongly recommended that I find myself a therapist or something. That turned out to be a game changer for me and my path.
After about a year of therapy, I decided that maybe it wasn’t such a bad career choice after all. I found a brochure about a master’s program in Marriage and Family Therapy on my desk one day, which none of my collogues seemed to know anything about, so I suspect it was the universe again pointing me in a better direction. I started my master’s in Marriage and Family Therapy a few months later in early 1997 at Barry University in Miami Shores, Florida.
I quickly found the research on attachment and trauma, and dove into understanding why our relationships were so important. Turns out that strong relationship connections are protective of trauma! I was trained as a clinical hypnotherapist and started seeing firsthand how our early experiences showed up later and that those patterns could be worked with, even as adults. I felt empowered and I thought I understood how to raise a healthy child. I was on fire!
And the universe laughed again.
My first baby arrived at the end of 1998, and I quickly realized that parenting was nothing like I had imagined, and all my training meant nothing if I couldn’t apply it. I found all the conflicting parenting information hard to navigate and struggled to find a clear path to raising an emotionally healthy and resilient child. I just knew I wanted to do things differently than I was raised, but I wasn’t sure exactly what that looked like! My son was a high-needs baby with allergies, and nothing I read in my parenting books seemed to help me to help him.
I was drawn to practices like babywearing, co-sleeping, and gentle parenting, but I often questioned whether I was making the right choices. But we found our way together. I loved being his mother and I was glad that I was able to be home with him. What happened next rocked my entire world and set me on a different path altogether. When my son was almost four, I experienced the devastating loss of a baby who died at birth. This tragedy spiraled me away from the connected parent I aspired to be, leading to escalating behaviors in my son and increasing reactivity in myself. I had no idea how to break free from the patterns we were stuck in, and parenting felt incredibly challenging during this time. When I welcomed my rainbow baby when my oldest was nearly five, it added even more complexity to an already difficult situation.
Through seeking resources and support to navigate my grief and understand my older son’s feelings, positive changes began to unfold. I had already been supporting parents through La Leche League, Attachment Parenting International (now Nurturings), and Families for Natural Living, which inspired me to start the Consciously Parenting Project in 2007. I’ve had the pleasure of supporting hundreds of families from 19 countries around the world, and I’ve been able to follow many of the families as their children have grown. I’ve written and published four parenting and relationship books, have trained 3 cohorts through my 2-year training program, and love my work now more than ever.
Now that my boys are grown, I have arrived at a different phase of parenting and life. I want to provide support for families to find their way to use their challenges for growth. With the current state of the world, I believe it’s even more crucial to understand what is needed to raise emotionally healthy children and families. Raising children is a big and important job, and we can’t do it alone. Together, we can support each other to find our own way. And we are changing the world, one individual, and one family at a time!