Navigating Shadows
Embracing complexity in the search for meaning
Got some dark and twisty stuff coming up as you navigate meaningful work in a challenging world?
i CAN RELATE, MANY TIMES OVER.
Hello. I’m Sara
I’m a former behavioral neuroscientist and psychology professor specializing in the impact of early and chronic stress on mental illness and addiction.
During my pregnancy, I experienced severe anxiety and panic, a result of triggering what I now know was generational trauma.
Despite (or due to) stabilizing through therapy, academia no longer offered me meaningful work. So I left.
Now I help folks navigate the the complex emotional and identity-related obstacles professionals face during career stagnation or change.
I tend to work with entrepreneurs in the healing arts, artists and writers, and the occasional secretly spiritual academic.
Coping through my Intellect
Like many (maybe like you), I coped with early anxiety and depression by relying on my intellect, working hard, being a perfectionist (aka trying to control everything).
This naturally led me to academia, where I trained as a behavioral neuroscientist and researched the effects of stress and drugs on behavior, hormones, and neuroplasticity related to addiction and mental illness.
I manage to secure a tenure track professorship in the psychology department at a quirky Liberal Arts College called Hendrix. And then I got pregnant…
Blind spots
I experienced intense pregnancy panic and anxiety, so I went to therapy.
(I went to therapy in high school too, it sucked, they read me Bible verses and made me feel even more uncomfortable in my existence)
In real therapy, I found out that I wasn’t actually crazy, and all the anxiety and depression might be related to my early life with parents that did their best but suffered with postpartum depression, bipolar disorder, and then divorced.
Despite it being my profession to study the impact of chronic stress on mental health, I was clueless of the impact of my early life on me.
Life is funny that way. I believe we call those blindspots.
stop Throwing Mom under the bus
I got stable in therapy, BUT I also developed a strong dislike for how everything I was dealing with suddenly got blamed on my parents, especially my mom.
Selfishly it probably stemmed from being pregnant and reading online “it’s not my fault I have anxiety, it’s because my mom was anxious when she was pregnant.”
And I thought, now hold on a minute. I’m the anxious mom here, but it’s not my “fault” either.
And while I’m at it, it wasn’t my mom’s “fault” she had postpartum depression either… why are we always throwing mother’s under the bus?
Why does it not being my “fault” automatically make it someone else’s “fault”?
And so the seed to understand generational trauma was planted. We have to look at the bigger picture and ancestral ecosystem as a whole.
A new direction
With a baby and while navigating my father’s death, I tried to go back to the old coping ways and old professional goals.
But everything was different.
The dangling carrots of academia were no longer motivating. I was no longer willing to sacrifice my life and family to an institution. I first tried to switch gears from doing pre-clinical research to doing research on mindfulness and self-compassion.
I hired a career coach, took a few intro coaching courses and started working with clients. I loved it. So I took a “real” training, Martha Beck’s Wayfinders coach training, while working full time and coaching clients at night.
At one point I was asked what my “Wildly Improbable Goal” was. I said “to end transgenerational trauma.”
Even though I had no idea how.
Leaving Academia
I did all of this transitioning and double working while having a baby/toddler. I look back and think it was insane how used to overworking I was. I would never tolerate that now.
But I was determined. Something pulled me along.
Eventually, I went from kind of done to REALLY done with academia.
I can’t remember how many final straws there were, but there were many.
The day that did it, I had water pipes full of boiling water burst in the ceiling and come within inches of scalding me. okay then!
I notified my department chair of my decision the next day and ended up giving FOURTEEN months notice (meaning I taught another year so I didn’t screw my department over).
That decision was the beginning, not the end.
BUSiness, Spirituality, and BLocks
During my long goodbye, I signed up for marketing and business programs. I also started attending cacao and tobacco plant medicine ceremonies with a visiting shamanic practitioner.
The academic, logical me was a bit shook by all this overtly spiritual stuff. But I carried on.
I was introduced to several new teachers of the healing arts and continued to deepen the work I was doing with clients.
I also invested in more business coaching, but never really saw substantial results from that work. I knew what to do and how to do it.
But I couldn’t do it, either due to internal blocks or external circumstances like family crises every time I started to make progress.
I was starting to feel hopeless. And then I found relational, systemic generational work.
Discovering real Generational healing
I was presented with the opportunity to train in family constellations.
In the process of doing my own personal work, I unlocked my ability to move forward in my business.
It came in fits and starts. And I was stubborn. I didnt’ want to let go of what I had been holding for so long.
Each shift I made, opened up new possibilities to gain traction in my life and business. And I’m not finished. But I’ve seen this change the game for myself and now for clients.
I’ve unequivocally stepped into what I’d call my calling.
I’m no longer stuck in confusion or hopelessness when something doesn’t work out as expected.
I’m no longer unconsciously funneling my life force into ancestral and generational tragedies.
DOing the hard things
Here’s where I’m supposed to tell you that I’m perfect now and I can help you be perfect too.
Except that’s not how life works. Being a human right now is challenging.
But I can for sure do really hard things.
Like transforming multi-generational patterns while parenting and growing a business during a pandemic.
Like reestablishing a healthy working relationship with ancestors and spirit despite a traumatic early spiritual experience and my family worrying I’m going to hell for it!
Even when the world is falling down around me, I’m okay. It’s not a problem.
I have immense sturdiness and capacity for choice now.
That feels like freedom.
Reality Check & HOPE
I’m not here to say that I have a stress-free life.
Or that you can have a stress-free life.
Anybody who tells you that is full of big piles of cow manure.
But it can get easier and you can become more able to do the hard things without falling apart or wondering if something is wrong with you.
And you can shift patterns that seem to never budge.
So that you can free up energy and space to expand your life into more of what you want, as opposed to more of the same old patterns that aren’t helping.
REady to step out of the fog?
Get started with a new client assessment & consultation today for $99
Relevant Training
I completed the following trainings (among others!) in the last few years to complement my 15 years of teaching and research in the neuroscience of stress and mental health:
- Wayfinder Life Coach training (Martha Beck)
- Somatic Self-Compassion training (Kristy Arbon)
- Complex Trauma Training Levels 1 and 2 (Janina Fisher)
- Compassionate Spirit Release & Curse Unraveling Training (Shamanic, Norse lineage; Andrea Bosbach Largent & Gayle Revels, lineage of Betsy Bergstrom)
- Family Systems Constellations Foundations Training for generational trauma (Andrea Bosbach Largent)
- GenoChart™ Multi-Generational Trauma Release Certification Training (Andrea Bosbach Largent, certified)
- Dropping into Pre and Perinatal Implicit Memory with Ease (Ray Castellino)
- Alchemical Alignment Foundations of Health (modules 1-3, Tele Dardin)
About you and Me
We might be a really good fit if several of the following are true.
- You generally have a logical or analytical mind or have worked in an analytical or logical background
- You are actively involved in or very interested in spiritual practices or being connected to your intuition
- You have a lot of books but have only read some (a few?) of them, or have read a little bit of most of them.
- You value creativity and think that art is medicine, even if you don’t think you are a creator.
- You can see that your parents were humans and that what they did/didn’t do had consequences for you but you don’t blame them for every difficult thing in your life
- You like to drop the occasional to frequent exclamatory F-word
- You aren’t afraid of being triggered and tend to like intensity
- You think are somewhat neurodivergent, but probably haven’t sought a diagnosis
- You have done a lot of personal work already, from trauma therapy to mindfulness or yoga.
- You’re primary mental health symptoms throughout life have included anxiety and some depression but maybe not enough to be fully clinical depression.
- You already have a pretty good idea of what your work/profession is, even if it’s shifting.
Still here!?
Well, here are some additional unusual tidbits about me!
- I’m named after Bob Dylan’s ex-wife and the song he wrote for her: Sara. I’m basically named after a heartbreaking divorce.
- I met Bob Dylan’s son, Jakob Dylan, of the Wallflowers at a gas station when I was 16. I got his autograph and told him I was named after his mother, at which point he asked the awkward question of whether my parents knew her. Ummm. No just really big fans. LOL. He still put me on his personal guest list to get into his concert for free that night.
- In high school, one of my best friends and I performed choreographed dances to ABBA songs at parties. That was the beginning and end of my performing career.
- My favorite job other than my current one was shoveling manure on a horse farm.
- I once accidentally ate a “special” brownie in graduate school and spent the rest of night using my knowledge of psychopharmacology to talk myself down from going to the ER over the crazy head pain I ended up with.
- I once tried to lead a “chocolate” mindfulness meditation in my behavioral endocrinology class to introduce our mindfulness-based stress reduction project. I couldn’t take it seriously and started laughing SO hard that I ended up snorting like a pig, as I do when in the throes of unbridled laughter.
- I used to be quite good at microsurgeries involving insertion of tiny catheters into the jugular vein of rats in order deliver IV drugs (pressing levers and all that). We used methamphetamine and “bath salts” in that lab.
- I published a review article on the neurocircuitry of addiction and one of the figures is an MRI photo of my own brain. Though now that we have way more than “PowerPoint” to create images at our fingertips, the graphics are a tad embarrassing.
- I am the worst text typer. Between my typos and autocorrect you have to basically learn a new language to communicate with me.
- I’m equal parts bubbly + silly and dark + melancholy.
