For a while now, I have felt like I have been all over the place.

One day I am talking about trauma. Another day it is brain injury. Then domestic violence, strangulation, the nervous system, memory, survival behaviors, neuro rehabilitation, healthcare, the gaps in our systems, or something I learned while trying to understand my own brain.

Add in speaking, training, a podcast, YouTube, blogs, social media, and my own continued healing, and sometimes even I have wondered:

What exactly am I trying to build here?

I think I finally know.

And the funny thing is, I didn’t choose a niche.

I followed the questions.

It Started With Questions I Needed Answered

Long before I was teaching other people about trauma and the brain, I was trying to understand myself.

Why did I react the way I did?

Why could I know something rationally and still respond completely differently emotionally?

Why were there things I couldn’t remember?

Why did my brain and body respond to situations that didn’t seem dangerous?

Why did symptoms that appeared completely unrelated somehow seem connected?

And perhaps one of the biggest questions:

Why did so many people see pieces of what was happening to me, but nobody seemed to see the whole picture?

Healthcare saw one piece.

Mental health saw another.

The legal system saw another.

People around me saw behaviors.

I saw what I believed were personal failures.

It would take years for me to begin understanding that many of those pieces were connected.

Trauma.

Brain injury.

Strangulation.

The nervous system.

Memory.

Sensory processing.

Survival responses.

Behavior.

The brain and body trying to adapt to what had happened to them.

Once I began understanding those connections, I couldn’t stop asking questions.

And the more I learned, the more I realized how many other people had never been given this information either.

Then Other People Started Asking Questions

For approximately eight years, I have been teaching different trainings around trauma, domestic violence and strangulation.

I didn’t start those trainings with some master plan for what they would eventually become.

I taught what I had learned.

I researched.

I kept learning.

I listened to survivors.

I listened to professionals.

I watched what happened when people began connecting information they had previously learned in separate boxes.

And then I started hearing something over and over again.

People need to hear this.

Professionals would tell me they wished they had learned this information earlier.

People would tell me the training changed how they thought about the individuals they worked with.

Questions after trainings would lead me into another area of research.

A conversation with one professional would make me think about something another system might be missing.

Eventually, an agency I train for looked at the feedback from three separate trainings I had been providing on trauma, domestic violence and strangulation and asked me to bring those pieces together.

That became an intensive 11.5-hour, two-day domestic violence training offered to agency members across Ohio.

As I have begun teaching it, classes have often filled. In some areas, there have been waitlists.

And I started realizing that perhaps I needed to stop looking at comments like “more people need to hear this” as simply nice feedback.

Maybe people were telling me what needed to come next.

There Was Another Teacher in All of This: My Own Brain

At the same time I was teaching other people, I was still learning how to live inside and rehabilitate my own brain.

That has changed my work in ways I don’t think a textbook ever could.

I can read about neuroplasticity.

But there is something different about experiencing what repetition can do to a brain.

I can study sensory systems.

But there is something different about discovering what happens when the information coming from your visual, vestibular and proprioceptive systems isn’t integrating the way it should.

I can teach about the difference between emotional and rational processing.

But there is something different about looking backward and finally recognizing the times in my own life when I was operating almost entirely from survival.

Research gave me language.

Rehabilitation gave me experience.

My story gave me context.

The people I have trained and learned from gave me more questions.

And somewhere along the way, those things began connecting.

I Already Wrote a Book Once

There is another part of this story that I have talked about in some of my trainings.

I wrote a book years ago.

And I decided never to publish it.

That wasn’t an easy decision.

There was truth in that manuscript. There was pain. There were real experiences. There was a woman desperately trying to make sense of what had happened to her.

But when I look at that writing now, I recognize something I couldn’t recognize then.

She was writing from inside the wound.

She was writing largely from the emotional brain.

Her wounds were still open.

She knew what had happened to her, but she didn’t yet understand nearly enough about what had happened inside her because of it.

I don’t want to erase her.

Actually, I think I finally have enough compassion for her to do the opposite.

I want to understand her.

But I also know that I cannot look in the mirror today and feel proud of putting that version of my story into the world as the body of work that represents who I am now.

So I am starting again.

The facts of my story haven’t changed. The woman telling it has.

This time, I am writing from the version of me who can look backward from the rational brain and meet those younger versions of myself with something they desperately needed then:

Understanding.

The Gaps Look Different From Here

One of the strangest parts of healing is being able to revisit your own life with information you didn’t have when you were living it.

There are moments I understand completely differently now.

Interactions I interpret differently.

Behaviors I understand differently.

People I understand differently.

Systems I understand differently.

There are people who helped me without ever knowing how important their actions would become.

There are people who saw behavior without understanding what was underneath it.

There were systems designed to help that simply didn’t know what they were looking at.

And there were times when I didn’t understand myself well enough to explain any of it.

That is part of why I began writing my Open Letter Project.

Letters to people.

Letters to systems.

Letters to younger versions of myself.

Not necessarily to assign blame or rewrite history, but to ask:

What do I understand now that I wish we had all understood then?

Those letters are becoming part of something much larger than I initially realized.

Maybe I Was Never All Over the Place

This is the realization I have been sitting with lately.

Maybe trauma, brain injury, strangulation, the nervous system, memory, behavior, neuro rehab, domestic violence and healing were never separate topics.

Maybe I wasn’t bouncing from subject to subject.

Maybe I was slowly assembling a puzzle without knowing what the finished picture was supposed to look like.

Now I can see it.

The question underneath almost everything I do has become remarkably simple:

What happened inside someone because of what happened to them?

And then:

What changes when we understand that?

What changes for a survivor who finally realizes there may be an explanation for something they have spent years feeling ashamed of?

What changes for a family member who begins looking underneath a behavior instead of only reacting to it?

What changes when a paramedic, police officer, advocate, attorney, judge, healthcare provider, mental health professional or child welfare worker understands that the behavior in front of them may be giving them information?

What changes when we recognize a possible brain injury?

What changes when we understand what strangulation can do?

What changes when we understand memory differently?

What changes when we stop asking only:

“What’s wrong with this person?”

And become curious enough to ask:

“What might have happened here?”

Understanding doesn’t eliminate accountability.

It doesn’t mean every behavior is acceptable.

It doesn’t mean everything is trauma.

It means we become willing to look at the whole person before deciding what their behavior means.

And Now I’m Building

That realization has changed the direction I want to take my work.

I am writing again.

I am beginning to build online education from information I have spent years teaching in rooms around Ohio and beyond.

I am continuing to speak and train.

I am continuing to research.

I am continuing my own neuro rehabilitation.

And now I am adding another challenge: training my brain and body toward a marathon while intentionally working on my strength, flexibility and movement.

I want to document that too.

Not because I am becoming a fitness creator.

Because I am fascinated by what happens when we intentionally ask the brain and body to change.

What happens with repetition?

What happens with appropriate challenge?

What happens when I push too hard?

What happens when I recover?

What happens to balance, endurance, strength, flexibility, coordination and nervous-system regulation over time?

I don’t want to show only the finish line.

I want to document what happens on the way there.

And I want to do the same thing with the book and the courses I am beginning to build.

Because I am already discovering that writing again brings memories to the surface.

Building a course makes me think about moments from trainings.

Research leads me back to experiences I understand differently now.

A run teaches me something about my brain.

A neuro-rehab exercise reminds me how complicated something that looks incredibly simple can actually be.

I don’t want to rush past those moments just because they don’t fit neatly into a chapter or PowerPoint slide.

I want to capture them.

Every Brick Matters

I have started thinking about my life this way:

Every experience has been a different-sized brick.

Some were enormous.

Some seemed insignificant at the time.

Some hurt.

Some healed.

Some came from people who helped me.

Some came from systems that failed me.

Some came from mistakes I made.

Some came from research.

Some came from standing in front of a room teaching.

Some came from sitting alone trying to understand my own brain.

Some came from finally being able to look backward at a younger version of myself without judging her.

One brick by itself doesn’t look like much.

But together?

They built the foundation I am standing on today.

And maybe the next part of my work isn’t simply about standing on that foundation.

Maybe it’s about showing people how it was built.

For the survivor who still thinks something is fundamentally wrong with them.

For the family trying desperately to understand someone they love.

For the professional who knows there is something more happening with the person sitting across from them but hasn’t been given all the pieces yet.

That is where I am going.

And for perhaps the first time, I don’t feel like I’m all over the place anymore.

I can finally see how the pieces connect.

Next Sunday, I am going to share the roadmap for what The Courageous Journey will look like for the rest of 2026 — what I am writing, what I am building, what I am learning, and what we are going to explore together.

But before I showed you where I am going, I wanted you to understand how I got here.

I didn’t choose a niche.

I followed the questions.

And they led me here.

I can’t wait to see where they lead us next.

Healing begins with understanding.