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, , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with ! Join us for my next live video in the app.Summary of this special live talk between
and :The imprints of trauma weren’t a distant echo or sudden revelation. They were daily air. From the age of 2.5, I lived in a body and world that told me I didn’t belong. Not with the girls. Not with the boys. Not even in my own home. I adapted because I had to—but adaptation isn't healing.
Then came the car crash in 1985. My father died. I didn’t. That trauma didn't begin my story—it simply pierced through the surface of a life already shaped by rejection, isolation, and survival.
By 1986, I came out as a lesbian. And again, I lost nearly everything. I stood on the edge—literally—just months later, in January 1987. Only my baby brothers tethered me to life.
It took years of therapy to name what I had lived through: abuse, not discipline. Conditioning, not care. I thought that awareness meant healing. But what I had really done was look at a snapshot of my pain—not yet step into it.
When my partner died in early 2020, it all cracked open again. The pandemic silenced distractions. Grief and insolvency brought me to my knees. And in that quiet, I finally began to hear myself.
I reached out for help. Coaching became my lifeline. Slowly, I began remembering. Not just facts—but feelings, fractures, forgotten parts. I saw how my beliefs, shaped by early conditioning, weren’t truly mine. The canyon inside me started to reveal itself.
That’s how the Canyon Model emerged—not as a theory, but as lived truth. A metaphor at first, then a map. A place where trauma isn’t a story we tell once but a terrain we walk—layer by layer, memory by memory. A way to trace what shaped us and choose how to walk forward.
And here’s what’s next:
There will be a second episode—where I’ll take you deeper into my Canyonlands, and show how the Canyon Model can help make sense of your own past. How the inner landscape, once feared, can become familiar. Mapped. Illuminated. Not to erase what’s been—but to reclaim it.
If you're standing somewhere in your own canyon, unsure of the path—maybe my story can help you find a light of your own.
Let’s keep walking.
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