My Story

When I was 31, I was in an unhealthy relationship and living in a moldy house. These emotional and environmental stressors caused my system to collapse, and I developed severe environmental sensitivities. I left my job and my home in Austin and moved to a "camp" for people with environmental illness outside of Dallas. ​

​

I was prescribed nutritional supplements and preservative-free allergy shots by environmental medicine doctors. This combined with avoiding most environmental toxins helped, but I was still on disability and living isolated from society.​

​

It wasn’t until I learned about neuroplasticity and how our brains can be rewired to create healthier responses to triggers that I began to get my life back.

​

I found a brain retraining program specifically for people with environmental illness. We gave the brain new modes of sensory input – verbal, physical, and visual - each time it repeated the stuck pattern of hypersensitivity. This interrupted the alarm state while creating a new mental and emotional connection with the trigger.​

​

During that time, I was also participating in conference calls where the facilitator would work with people using principals of unconditional love and acceptance. People's connections in their brains changed when they felt loved and accepted in the face of admitting things that were often quite painful. I participated in the calls for a few years until I finally got up the courage to go to a weekend workshop being put on by the author of the principals that was being held in Dallas.

​

While holding me in his arms like a baby, he told me that I thought I had to be sick, but I didn't. I actually got to be happy and live life. I believed him.

​

After the workshop, I stayed in the home of one of the participants. I agreed not to ask her to change anything in her environment – perfume, cleaning products, laundry soap etc. Every time I got afraid of a smell, I had to call someone and tell them I was afraid. This wasn't easy, but I kept doing it, and it worked! It became clear to me that I had transferred past fears from my relationship and other things to smells. Within a few short months, I had moved to Dallas into a regular apartment and had rejoined society. My symptoms didn't go away overnight, but I now knew they weren't going to kill me.

​

I returned to working and eventually landed a position at a nonprofit working with cancer patients. Because of my own experience with life-altering illness and having to depend on government programs to meet my basic needs, I found I was uniquely qualified to bear witness to the fear and pain of the patients I worked with. I was humbled and moved by people's willingness to trust me when they were at their worst and put their hearts in my hands. 

​

During that time, I got trained in Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART) and began using it to work with my clients. The effects were profound. The first client I did ART with had witnessed the traumatic death of beloved grandparent to cancer and had lost the ability to hear his voice. I saw her go from being curled in on herself in devastation, picking at her skin to quell the terror to literally bouncing in her seat with joy like a child at the end of her first ART session. I witnessed the power of how eye movements and creative visualizations could help people rewire their brains quickly and effectively.

​

This is what led me to start a private counseling practice. I want to get ART out there to as many people as possible, to bring the possibility of healing without having to retell all the horrible details. to people whose lives have been turned upside down by stress, fear and illness like mine was.