Hi, I’m Melissa short
I am a Wife, Mom, follower of Christ, and also a survivor of trauma. I am a Certified Trauma Support Specialist and a Trauma Recovery Coach. You can read more about my training here.
I am passionate about empowering women like you on your healing journey by helping you to reconnect to yourself, befriend your hard to be with emotions and develop a more compassionate approach to yourself.
All your struggles make sense and there is a wealth of inner resources within you. There is nothing wrong with you. Parts of you just need the right support and care so you can make your way through your struggles and pain with more compassion, clarity, peace, and confidence.
I have had a pull towards this inner healing work since 2008 when I first started my own healing journey. The road to getting here has looked so different than I imagined.
Looking back I know that all the pain, trauma, loss and heartache I have been through prepared me to be able to hold the depth of other’s stories too. It is something that I take great care with, and feel honored when a client invites me to be a support to them through those places.
You may have felt like, “no one truly understands what I have been through, or “why am I still struggling after all these years?” You may already tried so many different therapies and counseling and been left feeling like, “there still feels like there is something I’m missing.”
I get that. Trauma-Informed work was the beginning of things really clicking for me. We are mind, body, spirit and soul and we need to integrate all parts of us to truly experience the healing we desire.
I believe my biggest strengths are compassion, creating safe spaces, and hope. I bring this to my work as a coach. I don’t just think you can heal, I know you can because you were created for it.
Whether you are just passing through or you book a call so we can meet, I am so glad you stopped by!
~Melissa
A few fun facts about me..
I grew up in the Napa Valley of California, but currently reside in the Carolina’s and I love the South!
My favorite thing to do is explore outdoors with my family! We love hiking, waterfall chasing, and tubing, kayaking, and finding creeks and adventures off the beaten path.
My Favorite food is Mexican. I love coffee, Sparkling water, Passion Iced Tea, and a good glass of red wine.
I have a pet bunny named Bounce and she has the softest fur you have ever touched and is as sweet as can be.
I love to read and walk. I love deep conversations and naps.
I am consider myself an HSP (Highly Sensitive Person).
That’s about all for now!
My Story
After a very traumatic season in life, I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t able to move forward. While the experience, the location, and even the relationships from that season in my life were in the rearview mirror, it was as if that experience was still with me.
So I did all the things we are taught to do as Christians; I prayed, forgave those that harmed me, surrendered everything to God, sought counseling, deliverance and inner healing. And while those things helped, there was still something missing. I was still struggling. The un-resolve of these issues led to years of on and off cycles of depression, burnout, overwhelm and chronic stress.
My emotions overwhelmed me constantly. Avoidance and reactivity were normal parts of living. I felt frustrated, alone in my experience, and without support. Parts of me shut down for years. I didn’t realize how the culmination of those events caused me to reorganize my whole life differently. It felt like time froze and valuable years of my life were disappearing while I just stayed stuck.
In 2020 it all came to a breaking point for me. I needed help. My desire for answers led me to finally deciding I needed to try something different. I was taught that psychology and traditional therapy were self-centered and simply just behavior modification that wouldn’t help me. So I was very cautious and guarded but, I decided to meet with a therapist.
My therapist specialized in IFS (Internal Family Systems) Psychotherapy and it was there that I began to understand that I had unresolved Trauma and actually began to heal from it. I understood that the imprint of what happened in the past was still affecting my present as if it were still happening. I learned that it wasn’t something defective or wrong with me that prevented me from moving forward, or a lack of faith. But that my body and my brain were responding normally as they should, to protect me.
I understood that we are complex beings and have many parts or aspects that make up the system of who we are. I discovered how I could connect and work with these parts of me that held wounds/trauma instead of against them. I gained new ways to approach pain, stress, and challenges that have expanded my capacity to handle adversity.
As a result of my healing, I am embracing who I am and learning to take a kinder approach to myself. I have more peace and am making progress in my life that is sustaining and not fleeting with every wind and wave. Things aren’t perfect and healing doesn’t make the hard stuff go away. But healing has enabled me to live a better life.
That’s why I do this work. I believe in it and I have experienced it. I know it works and I know it can help other women like me too!
My Approach
INTERNAL FAMILY SYSTEMS
Is an evidence based psychotherapy model, created by Dr. Richard Schwartz. Internal Family Systems is powerfully transformative. In this model the belief is that our minds are naturally multiple, meaning we have many parts to that make up the system of who we are( not the same as multiple personalities). In IFS we welcome all parts of us. There are no “bad” parts, only good parts stuck in bad or harmful roles.
We don’t often realize the inner dialogue we have going on all the time with these parts of us. For example; “ A part of me feels really angry at this person who hurt me and wants to tell them how I feel, another part of me feels like I am making a big deal and should just drop it. A part of me really wants to quit my job, and another part of me is afraid of what might happen if I do.”
IFS helps us make sense of these different parts of us. Often parts of us are running the show of our lives, instead of our authentic selves.
In a session we befriend our parts by getting to know them. We help create a relationship between us and these parts. We find that they have a story to tell, they have needs that are usually not getting met, they have fears and took on a protective role as a means to help us through some very hard times in our lives. They may have also taken on a a more vulnerable role and hold deeply seated beliefs that are not true to who we are. We often find that these parts are younger and usually the age when the wounding occurred. As we get to know these parts and help them unburden we find that healing naturally happens. We experience integration and transformation.
MIND-BODY APPROACH
The essence of trauma is disconnection. Trauma disconnects us from an awareness of what’s going on in our bodies and out of being present. It disconnects us from the very things we need to thrive and handle adversities. For example, our sense of agency, our ability to detect what is real versus perceived danger and our ability to have choice. For Christian’s this can translate over to our connection to God.
Reconnecting and recovering our self which has had to go into exile is essential. Rebuilding trust within yourself is a very important part of Trauma Recovery.
Because we experience trauma and painful past learning in our bodies (stored through sensory fragments) the way to work through and heal it is by incorporating mind-body awareness as we heal. Trauma literally changes our brains and our physiology. Trauma is an on going experience in your body. This is based on research we now have from neuroscience and brain scans.
The good news too is that we also now know that our brains have Neuroplasticity which means they can heal!
Ways that we incorporate our bodies in our healing are: understanding our autonomic nervous system, knowing when we are outside of our window of tolerance, and recognizing when we are being activated and are in the fight, flight, fawn, freeze, or shut down states. We check in with our bodies and notice what’s happening in them because our bodies are receiving 80% of our emotional information before our brains do.
As we begin to become more aware of how emotions are showing up in our bodies we can begin to move through those emotions more smoothly, respond instead of react and re-establish safety in our bodies.
CHRISTIAN FAITH
This is an optional piece. If you are a Christian and would like to integrate your faith into our time together, we can absolutely do that. I follow your leading in this and will ask you questions early on in our initial sessions to see what kind of support you are looking for.
I have a personal history with Spiritual trauma and toxic faith/cult-like systems. I know how hard it is to come out of those systems, and the damaging impact it can leave on people’s lives.
If you are experiencing or have experienced church hurts, are having a crisis of Faith, feel disillusioned and /or re-evaluating what your faith means to means to you, either by deconstructing, or reconstructing faith, I can offer you support as a place to process. I can also share with you things that have helped me recover and rebuild after I processed through these things.
Sometimes it is none of those things, but that we don’t feel connected to God, we want to hear his voice, we struggle to feel peace about our salvation and who we are in him. We feel like we are doing the normal things we have always done in our relationship with God, but they feel dry and lifeless now. Or maybe we have never known deep in our hearts the assurance of his love. These things are areas over the course of my life I have walked through and can encourage you and help support you.
Maybe you don’t consider yourself spiritual at all, but you are curious and seeking. Maybe you find yourself asking, “What is spirituality all about?” You are welcome here.
This space will never be a place to be told what to think or believe. I will not give you “spiritual answers” for your very real pain and experience. This is a place where you can be totally transparent about anything and everything in regards to your faith journey and find compassion and empathy. I respect where each person may be at on their own journey.