ABOUT

Narcissistic Abuse doesn't target weakness.

It targets the wound.

I was a Division I athlete. Inducted into the Hall of Fame at both colleges I attended. Named NCAA Woman of the Year for the state of Montana. I spent a summer working in an orphanage in South America and another fighting forest fires with the USDA.

What I understand now — that I couldn't see then — is that the drive behind all of it wasn't really confidence. It was a pattern I had learned long before my marriage: that love and worth were things you earned through performance. That if you just worked hard enough, achieved enough, were good enough — you would finally be enough.

That pattern didn't protect me from narcissistic abuse. It walked me straight into it.

Because narcissistic abuse doesn't target weakness. It targets the wound. And mine — like so many survivors — was the deep, quiet belief that my worth was something I had to continuously prove.

Inside my marriage I worked harder than I had ever worked at anything. And somewhere in the middle of all of that trying, I became completely invisible. I stopped trusting my own perception. I stopped believing my feelings were valid. I genuinely believed, for a long time, that I was the problem.

That is what this dynamic does. Not just to people who never felt enough. To people who spent their whole lives trying to be. The wound is the same. The work to heal it is the same.

And if I found my way back — you can too.

THE TURNING POINT

For a long time, I didn't have language for what was happening inside my marriage. I just knew that no matter how hard I tried, how carefully I communicated, how much I gave — nothing fundamentally changed. The cycles were getting faster. The anger and rage were more frequent. The fights had no resolution. I stopped being able to see a future. Where it used to be, there was just — blank.

In that final year, a counselor showed me the Power and Control Wheel. I recognized my marriage in it immediately. And I still desperately wanted it to work.

I had five children. Twenty years together. A life completely intertwined. I couldn't imagine what a failed family looked like — or what it would cost. And yet I could also see, clearly, that what was happening was not healthy or sustainable. I remember deciding at one point that it was over — and feeling, in the same breath, profound shame. Not about him. About myself. I remember thinking I would never want to marry again because I wouldn't want to put another man through what I had put my husband through.

That is how thoroughly my reality had been managed. I was sitting with the conviction that his disappointment, his anger, his hurt — were mine to carry. That I had caused them. That I was responsible for them.

He left me for his new supply.

And the marriage that I had been trying so hard to save — the one I had been contorting myself for two decades to hold together — ended not with my choice, but with his.

What followed was devastation. And also, eventually, the beginning of everything.

FINDING THE LANGUAGE

The turning point wasn't a single moment. It was a slow accumulation of accurate information finally reaching a nervous system that was ready to receive it.

When narcissistic abuse was named clearly — not minimized, not balanced against my own faults, not filtered through the lens of what I could do differently — something shifted. Not just in my understanding. In my body. The confusion that had been my constant companion for years began, slowly, to lift.

I stopped being the problem. I started being the survivor.

And I began the long, nonlinear, deeply embodied work of finding my way back to myself — to the person who had existed before the marriage, before the childhood that set the stage for it, before I had learned that love was something you earned through performance and maintained through self-erasure.

That work is what Somatic Gateway is built on. Not the theory of it. The lived reality of what it actually takes.

THE RETURN

One year before my marriage ended, I took a job as the head coach of our local high school basketball program. They hadn't won a game in two years.

I didn't know it then, but that job was the first sign that something in me was coming back. Something that had gone quiet inside the marriage — the competitor, the leader, the person who believed that effort and heart and the right team could change things — was beginning to stir.

Over the next four years, my coaching staff and I took that program to the state championship game. Not once. Twice. We won it in 2024. That same year, I was named Coach of the Year for our state.

I tell that story not because of the trophy. But because of what it meant to stand there — a woman who had spent two decades believing she was the problem, who had lost the thread of herself so completely she couldn't see a future — and know that she had built something. Led something. Won something. On her own terms, with her own people, in her own name.

That is what returning to yourself feels like. Not a single moment. A slow accumulation of evidence that you are still in there — and that she was never really gone.

Since then, the life that was blank has filled in ways I could not have imagined.

I met an extraordinary man. We married. We are blending families — eight children between us, six still at home — and building something I once believed was no longer possible for me. A home that is regulated. A love that doesn't require self-erasure. A partnership where I am seen.

I started Somatic Gateway in 2023. I have reconnected with friendships and community I had lost. I am pursuing passions that went dormant for years. I am a mother in a way I always wanted to be — present, regulated, genuinely there.

In 2025, I became a grandmother for the first time.

I can see a future again. A full one. One where I am my own person — with full agency, full expression, full creativity. One where we play and laugh and cry and connect. One where joy isn't something I manage carefully or brace against. It is just — life. My life. Returned to me.

That is what this healing makes possible. Not just surviving what happened. Actually living what comes next.

That is what I am here to help you find.

WHY SOMATIC

I earned my Master's in Counseling in 2003. I understood trauma, attachment, narcissistic personality disorder — intellectually, completely. I could have explained it from the DSM.

What I discovered in my own healing is that understanding is not the same as healing. That insight reaches the mind but not always the place where the harm actually lives. That the nervous system that spent years in chronic stress and hypervigilance needs more than accurate information — it needs direct, embodied, repeated experiences of something different.

Somatic healing was my answer. It reached the places that years of talking and understanding hadn't touched. It gave me tools that lived in my body — that I could reach for in a parking lot after a custody exchange, at 2am when the loops wouldn't stop, in the moments when the old shame arrived and tried to convince me it was still true.

Those tools are what I teach. Because I know, from the inside, what it means when something finally works.

THE TRAINING

I didn't stop at my own healing. I spent years developing the expertise and the framework to guide others through this specific terrain — because surviving it yourself and knowing how to hold someone else through it are two different things, and both matter.

Master's in Counseling
VITA Certified Coach
Somatic Practitioner
Breathwork Certified
Narcissistic Abuse Recovery Specialist
Parent of five — navigating parallel parenting in the aftermath of coercive control
Survivor — of the relationship, of the childhood that set the stage for it, and of the long road back to myself

WHAT I BUILT — AND WHY

Somatic Gateway is everything I needed and couldn't find.

When I was living through the hardest years, there was no sequenced, somatic, specifically-built healing path for survivors of narcissistic abuse and coercive control. There were therapists who didn't understand coercive control. There were generic trauma programs that weren't built for this specific terrain. There were books, and frameworks, and well-meaning support that reached me intellectually and left my body still braced.

So I built it.

The complete ecosystem — from the first moment of waking up to the deepest work of coming home. Clarity Coaching for anyone who needs individual support at any stage. Anchored for the early days after leaving. RISE for the full, sequenced arc of return. And the Parallel Parenting Suite for the specific, complicated terrain of raising children while still sharing space with the person who caused the harm.

Every offering is built on what I know to be true from the inside out: that healing requires safety first, the right tools second, and a guide who understands exactly what you've survived — not just from training, but from living it.

This is that guide. And this is that path.

A NOTE ON WHO THIS IS FOR

Somatic Gateway was built with survivors of narcissistic abuse and coercive control at the center — and it is open to anyone navigating this terrain, regardless of gender, relationship structure, or where they are in their journey.

The harm coercive control causes is not limited to one kind of person or one kind of relationship. Neither is the healing.

Whoever you are — if this terrain is yours, there is a place for you here.