Trauma
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Preventing Trauma for Complex Care Patients
I first entered the new wing of the Hospital for Sick Children in February 1993 – just over 27 years ago. Since that time I have had operations, birthed babies, spent time in the NICU, attended outpatient appointments, spent time in the ER, spent time with my kids as inpatients all in this building. I… Continue reading
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Medical Trauma
I grew up at Sick Kids. I had multiple operations over the years. Almost every surgery came with excruciatingly painful complications. One of those surgeries happened 33 years ago today. I was seven. I remember it vividly, including being in a hospital room which – for all intents and purposes – could very easily… Continue reading
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Preventing, Protecting and Healing: Part 3 – (Re-)Attachment
Today I want to finish off our week-long series by looking at what we can do when this happens to help ourselves or our loved ones heal. Continue reading
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Preventing, Protecting and Healing – Part 2: Support
What happens when we can’t prevent the procedures and experiences that we know might be potentially traumatic? When individuals and caregivers deal with lifelong disabilities or chronic illnesses, some portion of our lives is spent doing really hard things. Sometimes we get so ‘used’ to these things that we start to think of them as… Continue reading
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Preventing, Protecting and Healing – Part 1: Advocacy
Advocacy is a bit of a ‘buzz-word’ in many circles, and that is definitely true when it comes to disabilities. But anytime you have buzz-words, you also end up with a lot of confusion about what advocacy looks like and how it works – especially when you are dealing with people who are vulnerable either… Continue reading
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When Helping Hands Still Hurt – Part 2
Today I want to tell some stories of my own medical trauma, to help those of you who haven’t experienced this to start to wrap your head around what medical trauma might look and feel like and how that might impact someone, and to help break the silence for those who have experienced medical trauma… Continue reading
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When Helping Hands Still Hurt – Part 1
Today is the International Day of Persons with Disabilities. So this week seems like a good week to get back to writing and to think about some of the issues that go hand-in-hand with disabilities. Today I want to touch on a difficult topic for a lot of people, and that is the issue of… Continue reading
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“What Exactly Is a Life Coach?”
I was sitting with a friend the other day and she asked me, “Heather, what exactly is a life coach? What do you do?” And I figured maybe she wasn’t the only one who was uncertain… Continue reading
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A Rainbow of Truths
What if there wasn’t simply BLACK truth and WHITE truth? What if, instead, truth came in a RAINBOW of colours? Continue reading
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Trauma, Triggers and Moving Forward
Back in 2011 I was given the opportunity to expand my birth work to include working with women who had experienced sexual abuse. In doing the training for this role, I began to read more and more about trauma and especially about triggers. And the more I read about triggers, the more I realized that… Continue reading
About the program
In 2017 I was newly self-diagnosed with atypical autism, struggling with burnout, and striking out when it came to therapists who could address the issues I was facing. At the same time, I was building skills around life coaching, shame reduction, and trauma-informed therapy for work. Gradually I realized that what I needed – an embodied, autonomous, agency-driven coaching approach to unmasking – was not something I was going to find “out there”, but something I was going to need to create if I wanted to recover my life. This was the moment the Values Based Integration Process was born.
Having developed the program for myself – and having seen the incredible results it brought in my own life – I began to use it with coaching clients. The results were out of this world!
After conversations with Dr. Devon Price, the technique was featured in his book Unmasking Autism. With it, came interest in the technique and the decision was made to begin training coaches and therapists to help make this toolkit more readily available.
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