Welcome to lovelew

As a kid, I never knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. For my first twenty years of life, I floated around aimlessly – working in restaurants and retail (I worked at Lululemon when there were only two stores in the U.S.). 

One morning, when I was 21, I woke up to my mom calling me to tell me that my father died. He had committed suicide. It was shocking, yet not surprising.  My father struggled with mental health challenges for as long as I’d been around and he had talked about suicide before. I dealt with this loss by running away and avoiding – I moved out of state, moved in with my long-distance boyfriend, and proceeded on with my life without truly acknowledging the loss and its meaning to me.

A few years later, I finally finished college, after changing my major about 6 times, with a BA in Art History (still haven’t used that one), and went about my life as a waitress. Five years later, I woke up to another phone call. This one was more shocking, and, for me, more devastating. My on-again/off-again boyfriend and best friend in the whole world had died of a heroin overdose. My world collapsed at that moment. He was my everything. He was my person. Our relationship was complicated, but we knew each other in a way that I knew no one else. To say I was devastated was an understatement.

I believed there was absolutely no way I could continue to live in a world without him.

In the months and years that followed, I sought out all different kinds of support. I tried many different therapists, but really struggled to find a therapist who I felt wasn’t trying to “fix” me. It felt as if my grief was problematic to others, as if it was something that made people uncomfortable and that they wanted to fix or shut down. I didn’t know much at the time, but I knew that this did not feel right. I thought we could do better to support the brokenhearted, and I decided that, one day, I would try to do that.

Fast forward to 2012. When I graduated from grad school, I spent many years working as a therapist with some very traumatized populations – families involved with DCS, teens on juvenile probation, and incarcerated men and women. I learned a thing or two about trauma. Through this work and my continued education studies, I became fascinated with trauma, in particular the lesser-known childhood developmental or relational trauma. I uncovered and healed from many of my own childhood traumas, of which I had previously had no awareness. If you had asked me twenty years ago if I had experienced trauma, I would have said no. Now, it’s a resounding “of-f*cking course!”

I see my own personal healing journey as one of my greatest assets as a grief coach, mentor, and after-loss professional. I deeply understand trauma on both a personal and professional level, and I am able to offer a truly compassionate, supportive, and loving hand, while also creating a clear, direct, and accessible road to transformation.