Oct 22, 1979. My 18th birthday.
I was standing in the hallway of our home in Germany, pulling on my parka to cycle to school. My mother approached me to wish me happy birthday. Her wish for me: that I would never have children as horrible as the one I was.
You can tell from those words that things had not been going well in my family. On the surface, we were quite privileged: nice home, education, music, travel. Emotionally, however, our family was a war zone that had been raging for generations.
I escaped to university, initially to study biology. By the early 90s, after several changes of direction, I found myself in Scotland, working with people on the margins of society: homeless individuals with severe mental illness, sex trade workers, people affected by HIV/AIDS, at-risk youth. People whose lives had been visibly devastated by trauma. I loved the work but became frustrated when I realized that all we were doing was putting band-aids on problems with much deeper roots.
That realization caused me to pivot and return to university a second time to train as a person-centered counsellor. I felt that I had finally found what I was meant to do in life and was really making a difference.
Then, life took another turn. I decided to return to Canada - where I was born - only to discover that my European qualifications were worthless there. I was not in a position to finance yet another university degree and had to earn a living. For years I took whatever work I could find while trying to find my way back to the intensive healing work I really wanted to do.
In about 2014, a friend of the family mentioned EFT to me. Being the left-brained science nerd that I am, I immediately went and looked at the research. It was promising but limited. I filed it away under "interesting, keep watching" - and promptly forgot all about it.
A few years later "tapping" came up in another conversation. I looked at the research again - and discovered that it had exploded. Over 100 solid studies proving efficacy. I was sold. Within a couple of days I had signed up for training - and I am not someone who normally makes big decisions in a hurry! The evidence was simply so convincing.
Today I combine EFT with my person-centered counseling background and lived experience with complex trauma to guide people like you through your healing journey.
Why I Focus on People Who Want to Change the World: My Theory of Change
For decades, I worked with people whose lives had been completely derailed by trauma. Their suffering is visible, acknowledged by society, and it gets services (however inadequate). But in recent years, I've realized that there is a group of trauma survivors that is just as underserved: high-functioning people who have learned to hide their pain so well that nobody realizes just how bad things really are under the surface. Often, they themselves don't realize that they need help, even though the trauma they carry rivals anything I saw in my crisis work. And when they finally do find the courage to do something about it, they discover that there are not enough professionals trained or willing to work with really deep trauma. I have lost track of the number of people who have told me that they had been turned away by therapists who tell them their trauma is "too severe" or "too complex."
This is what makes me furious: talented, skilled, visionary people with solutions the world desperately needs are stuck - not because their trauma is untreatable, but because they've been told it is. Meanwhile, we face climate crisis, social injustice, health inequities, and a thousand other urgent problems. The waste of human potential is staggering and completely unnecessary. We have tools that work. As of 2025 EFT has over 300 research studies proving its efficacy, including for severe, complex PTSD. That's why I made a deliberate choice about my practice.
As a solo practitioner, I can only work with a limited number of people. So, I focus my time and attention where it can have the greatest ripple effect: on people whose healing will create change far beyond our sessions together. That is my "scaling." Not hosting events for 20,000 people or running surface-level courses. It's working at depth with individuals who then go out and bring their gifts to hundreds or thousands of people in their lifetime, who in turn bring their gifts to the world.
When you heal the trauma that's getting in your way, you don't just feel better—you gain capacity to bring your vision to life. And when you can finally show up fully for your mission, your impact reaches far beyond what we do together in these sessions.
It's the leverage I'm looking for. Your healing multiplies outward.
Want to read more about why I believe healing is the key to creating lasting change? Read my thoughts on turning pain into purpose.
Beyond the Therapy Work
I live on a small farm on Vancouver Island, off the west coast of Canada, with my husband. We are Level 3 foster carers for children and youth with complex trauma - we experience daily how trauma shows up in everyday life and understand what actual healing requires beyond theory. On our farm, we breed endangered livestock breeds, a different kind of mission to preserve what's valuable and at risk of being lost.
I'm also a genealogist and family historian with a deep interest in intergenerational trauma - how patterns pass through family lines and how healing yourself can break cycles that have persisted for generations. Sometimes, understanding your family's story really helps with understanding the patterns you are living.
The farm, my animals, the natural world around me keep me grounded - this work is intense, and I couldn't do it without balance and connection to the earth.
If my story resonates with you, I'd be honored to explore how we might work together. You can learn more about how EFT sessions work here or book a free first session here to experience it for yourself.
Love and War
On Apr 21, 1920, my grandfather, Heinrich Wilhelm Rötgens married my grandmother, Marie Julie Lootens. He was a German farmer's son; she came from an upper middle class urban family in Gent, Belgium. They had met during WWI when he was a soldier in the German army occupying Belgium. You can imagine my great-grandparent's dismay when their only daughter fell in love with an enemy soldier!
The wedding did go ahead despite their misgivings and I suspect that they may have kept their displeasure somewhat in check, for two reasons. One was that my grandmother was already 30 years old and they were probably worried that she might never find a husband. In the 1920s, this still mattered. And, secondly, they had already fallen out with their son who had also married someone of whom his parents disapproved: a young Frenchwoman whom he had met - you guessed it - as a soldier during WWI and married in Hull, England.
You may have noticed that my grandmother was, oddly, wearing a black dress with her white veil. The family was, in fact, in mourning. They had just been informed that my grandmother's above mentioned brother had been lost at sea when the ship he was working on as a cabin steward sank during a storm on a return voyage from New York. With only a few days to go until the wedding it had been too late to call it off.
I had heard the story growing up but it took me decades to work out what had really happened as some of the details had been passed on incorrectly. For example, I had always been told the young woman my great-uncle had married against his parent's wishes was English. It wasn't until I finally located their wedding certificate in England that I realised that she was, in fact, French. The story also went that my grandmother travelled to England to find her brother's wife but that the woman, having been rejected by her husband's family before, wanted nothing to do with them. She returned to France and married twice more, her second husband also having died young. I discovered this only because a living descendant posted a family tree online. It is strange to think that, because of the sharing of information made possible by the internet, I now know far more about my mother's uncle and his story than my mother ever did.
@ Copyright 2026 Healing All Our Pasts | All rights reserved
@ Copyright 2026 All Our Pasts Are History
All rights reserved
