about Tanya

I often think about the trauma, the joys, the richness and blessings that brought me to this present moment. If I had not experienced those things it is very likely I would be a different woman today. So I found peace with my past and look to my future with faith and trust that no matter what I will be ok.
How did I arrive at this place in my life? The short answer is simply by going through it and finding effective ways of helping me to process the trauma. No small task!

As a child I felt everyone’s emotions keenly and I appointed myself as peacemaker in my family of origin. I just wanted peace more than anything.
Anxiety and darkness were always present in my personal life and I became a master at appearing to be well and confident. Still I would always try to help people feel better. However I would often take on their darkness making my own load of emotional turmoil even heavier. So I would experience inexplicable periods of depression and anxiety.
I tried medication and I got all the side effects and none of the benefits. I tried mainstream mental health experts with no results at all. And that was before my decade of fire and fury.
I am australian and I married an American man and migrated to USA. We had a little boy born here in the US.

I spent 8 years in the USA before returning as a family to Australia because my mother had been diagnosed with a terminal illness. 2 years later she passed away.

So my box of emotional turmoil, darkness, and anxiety just overflowed when I added grief on top of it. It reminded me of Pandora’s box. I could not get the lid back on, so any ways that I was using to numb pain divert attention away etc simply did not work anymore. It was overwhelming.

Soon I began to have memories of childhood abuse returning. I had returned to live in the area where they had happened to me as a child. I had heard of women with suppressed memories of childhood trauma, but I never dreamed I would be one.

My story is not unique. Childhood trauma and abuse is and has been a well hidden generational issue. It’s not my intention to call out my abusers and demand justice, that’s not my purpose. It’s my intention to share my story because at some point if you had a similar experience you can find your peace with it. You find beauty in the rawness, the humanity, the weakness, the flaws, the wounding and then you realize that because of these events you have the strength, the courage, the love, the compassion and the understanding to help support others through their pain.

Body psychotherapy helped me work through the initial stages of my process. It helped me make the connections between negative beliefs and childhood wounding and trauma and my physical body. I had excellent support working through the trauma and I have enduring love and gratitude for the therapists who helped me. I started to understand some patterns in my behaviour that were directly connected to negative thoughts (“ I’m stupid” was a favorite), subconscious beliefs and feelings directly connected to these( depression ).

So I became more and more self aware and I took responsibility for my own choices as opposed to simply being a powerless victim. I was actually surprised at how angry I was about what happened to me as a child and I mean furious.

I am a peaceful person at my core and I desire peace even more than joy, so it was really confronting to realize I was carrying so much fury. The loss of innocence, the loss of my childhood, and new unhealthy beliefs and boundaries that were put in place. All through this time it felt like I was in a category 5 hurricane. Every level of my being was challenged, physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.

I had to challenge my beliefs, all of them, and ask myself, “Are they really true?” then reframe the memories with understanding and compassion, Shift my perception of the world and other human beings.

It’s been a stormy journey, but one I am grateful for. For along the way I met myself and I learned to love and accept her, to forgive her for mistakes and bad choices and embrace the mess of being an imperfect human instead of a perfect fantasy.

I also came across some excellent tools to work through trauma without reliving it. So when I help others I help them shortcut their process, very quickly to help them recover feeling centered and focussed on the future.

We relocated back to the USA and have been back for 5 years now. I believe it takes about 5 years to adjust to an international move. I have since found new processes to help let go of emotional trauma without going deep into the actual trauma itself.