My life’s work has been to seek relief from pain. Even as a young woman I endured a deep ache in my lower back, hips and neck as well as headaches and jaw pain, and as I aged I struggled with pain in my feet, hands, and arms. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t alternating between chronic or acute physical pain.

At the same time, I grappled with anxiety, depression, insomnia, and a persistent feeling that I didn’t deserve to be loved. I was unable to feel deep intimacy in any of my relationships, but I found it increasingly difficult to be alone. By external measures I was enviably functional, raising my children and pursuing my career dreams at the same time. But fear, heartbreak, and a frozen sense of separation drove my life.

I now know that these are trauma symptoms. Over the years I learned to manage them, with varying degrees of success, through meditation, yoga, and long walks. I sought relief in making music, singing, dancing, textile arts, cross-country skiing, and backpacking in the wilderness. I explored numerous psychoanalytical therapies including cognitive behavioral therapy, neuro-linguistic programing, Jungian group process work, and Al-Anon. I took antidepressants but couldn’t stand the feeling of numbness they brought. Though psychoactive substances made me feel like I was dying, I could leave no stone unturned in my effort to treat my symptoms or at least understand them, so I tried ayahuasca sessions with a Peruvian shaman and peyote sessions with a Huichol shaman from Mexico. I also tried LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, and marijuana. All of these practices, pastimes, techniques, and medicines have benefitted me, but nothing addressed the core of my struggles or gave me measurable relief from my overall malaise.

 Despite my trauma symptoms or perhaps because of them, I am extremely sensitive and empathetic, achingly attuned to pain in other people. I instinctively began doing massage on everyone, starting with my family, when I was a young child. In my search for a solution to chronic pain I wanted to understand how muscles move bones, so in college I studied kinesiology and anatomy and became a massage therapist, focusing my practice on chronic and acute pain. I later studied craniosacral therapy, attracted by its emphasis on alleviating emotional pain through the body, and I have been a practitioner of this therapy for thirty years. I also teach therapeutic yoga for individuals who struggle with stress management and chronic pain.

My journey to becoming a more proficient therapist has also been about finding therapists to help me get my own body and mind out of pain. I built a large, busy practice collaborating with—and being worked on by—top-notch chiropractors, Rolfers, craniosacral therapists, massage therapists, structural integration therapists, acupuncturists, and lymph drainage and visceral manipulation therapists. I’ve had two hip replacements, and with a meticulously managed strength-training maintenance schedule incorporating these therapeutic practices and a daily yoga practice, I was eventually able to manage my physical pain. What I couldn’t manage was the intermittent bouts of profound depression and persistent anxiety, and a deep-seated conviction that I couldn’t really take care of myself, which meant that even though I saw myself as fundamentally unlovable, I needed to fool other people into loving and taking care of me.

And then I got sick. Overnight I became devastatingly ill with digestive problems. Nothing helped, and I panicked as I rapidly lost a great deal of weight and struggled to continue my work as a therapist through bouts of debilitating diarrhea. After receiving a diagnosis of colitis I was prescribed a round of steroid therapy, which helped me eat again, but the steroids affected my adrenal system, making it difficult to sleep.

My dreams became increasingly horrifying—graphic dreams about what happened to me when I was a child. Shattered by the way this flood of pain had found a way around all the systems and structures I had worked so hard to put in place, I began to wonder if these resurfacing horrors were not a key to unlocking and understanding the source of my physical and emotional pain.