Meet Christie
(She/her)
Welcome! I am so glad you are here. I am a trauma therapist, coach, and first and foremost, a human being who has experienced what it is like to feel trapped beneath the weight of trauma despite the enormous efforts to grow and heal. I know what it is like to spiral in shame, and to be on the brink of giving up on yourself when all your healing methods felt like empty promises.
My passion is to support you in this part of your journey as someone who has been there and has found a path that leads to real change that you will notice in yourself and your relationships.
My Story
I know what it feels like to grow up in chaos and call it normal. Narcissism, addiction, and emotional volatility shaped how I moved through the world and how I disconnected from myself just to get through.
I also know what it is like to live in survival mode—to feel like your trauma follows you into every situation and relationship. Throughout my life, I felt disoriented in my shame and was desperately looking for a sense of stability. I felt abandoned in my relationships and was quick to abandon myself.
One of the biggest lies I’ve lived with was, “I’m too messed up to be loved.” At one point I told myself I would never be able to get married or have kids because I had to quarantine myself from others (pretty dark stuff, but it’s truly what I believed). I self-sabotaged relationships despite my best intentions and that only reinforced this belief.
My own healing journey began with a combination of wild spaces meeting me in my darkest times, and a skilled therapist who was able to help me transform my trauma from something that left me fragile and ashamed to something that helped me be a responsive partner and someone who has a large capacity for compassion toward myself and others. Through my own counseling process—both couples and individual counseling—I began to find stable ground again. I learned how to feel safe in my body and relationships.
Years later, I enjoy life with my husband and two kids in our home in the mountains. If you told me years ago that this was going to be part of my path, I would have told you that there was no chance. But our journeys are mysterious and when we decide to be our biggest allies and fight for our wholeness, we will find treasures along the way we didn’t know possible.
Healing is hard work and it is so easy to lose hope and step off the healing path. I am here to companion you through your healing. I am here to hold hope for you and give you the support you need to keep traveling down this path until you find yourself fully you and fully alive again.
How a tree saved my life
Have you ever had a moment that changed the trajectory of your life forever? My encounter with a juniper tree was one of those.
In one of the darkest seasons of my life, I found myself canyoneering in Southern Utah, where I encountered a juniper tree for the first time. Our guide began to tell us how these trees would survive for hundreds of years in the harsh desert climate by cutting off nourishment to half of themselves so that the other half would live. Slowly, one side would grow heavier and just when you think it is going to fall, it turns itself back toward the sun and continues to grow. This is what gives them their twisting, turning shape.
As our guide began to share their method, I remember my eyes tearing up. I felt a tug within me to follow the path of the juniper– at that point in my life, it was time for me to release what was no longer serving me and to surrender to the process, knowing that in the surrendering, I will ocntinue to grow.
Healing is hard work. I’m not going to lie to you about that. At some points, we feel like there is no way we will see the other side of our breakdown. We begin to believe that the rock bottom is the end of our story.
I am here to tell you that it is not. In surrendering to the process and trusting our bodies and nervous systems (as well as the supportive communities around us) to guide us along our path to healing, we will find wholeness. We will come home to ourselves.
When I first saw that juniper I wanted to end my life, but the juniper reminded me that hard doesn’t mean impossible, and that so much of healing is about surrendering and leaning in rather than avoiding, managing, and trying to change ourselves.
If you are at your rock bottom, I see you. Hang in there friend, and reach out. This may feel like the end, but there is so much more waiting for you in this life.
Why I bring the healing outside
For as long as I can remember, nature was my refuge. In times when I found myself at my lowest point, nature would draw me back home to myself and provide the stable ground I longed for.
I found myself gravitating to big adventures and while it started as pushing myself to my limits (hello survival skills!) it ended up becoming my way of healing.
I would climb big walls, run ultras, do thru hikes, all as a way of giving my soul the space to remember my strength and finally come home to who I’ve always been, but never felt allowed to be.
My healing journey started when I stopped trying to protect myself from life and opening myself to the ways my body and these wild spaces were trying to guide me back home to myself.
When I stopped trying to be unaffected and instead allowed safe people and places to affect me, I discovered a whole other version of myself I didn’t know existed.
Nature and my body have been my best friends in my own healing process, and the healing of so many others I’ve walked with. I have found nature and community to be the two most healing tools we have access to in life.
My passion to apply this healing work within wilderness settings first developed when I was a backpacking instructor, helping parents and teens heal their relationships through backpacking and rock climbing.
I was swept away by the beauty before me when families would mend relationships that they thought were irreparable.
I have found that taking the healing into these wild spaces where we have to release our illusion of control and welcome the natural challenges that come with being in the wilderness, we have the chance to encounter our most true, vulnerable selves. We access parts of us that we struggle to access in our more controlled environments and our hearts become receptive in ways they haven’t before.
And doing this in community? Well this only takes the experience deeper. There is nothing like encountering our vulnerabilities and fears in the context of a group of people who know how to sit with us in that space well. It literally reorients our nervous systems and body as a whole to adapt to a new normal: safe relationships.
Our breakdowns become our breakthroughs and we begin the process of adapting to safety. In doing so, we heal.