Hi there!

 My name is Lauren, and I want to share my story with you. In 2009 I noticed I was feeling lower energy than normal at the age of 24. I had recently bought my first house with my husband and was in the beginning of my career as an RN.  At that time in my life, I was working nights and feeling socially isolated. I found a deceased patient as a new nurse which led to a lot of anxiety about my job. My parents divorced, which led me to become my sick mother's sole caretaker.  And then in 2011, my mother passed away. Though I thought I was tough and “dealing” with everything quite well, I now understand how these events were keeping me in a high alert state. During these years I would categorize my fatigue as mild,  but it was only the beginning.

 

 In 2018, I was helping my dad, who had been diagnosed with dementia, through a particularly toxic divorce. As a mom of two young boys and working as a nurse, my fatigue was getting worse. I'd crash at 7 p.m. and not be able to move off the couch to help my husband put the kids to bed. This continued intermittently for a couple years. I’d visited doctors several times over the course of those 9 years but everything always came back normal.

 

Fast-forward to March of 2020, I was one of the not-so-lucky ones to get Covid 19, right at the beginning of the pandemic. I believe my immune system was vulnerable because of the stress of helping my father through his divorce.

I had a mild case, but after two weeks my fatigue continued. Not only did it continue, but it essentially "exploded" and was worse than ever! I had fatigue every day, sometimes all day long. I went to doctor after doctor looking for answers but they never knew what was wrong. I did hours of research on my own and spent what seemed like every free minute of my day trying to figure out what was happening to my body. I changed my diet, took a boatload of daily supplements, and read everything I could about fatigue.

  

During this time, I was also working 12-hour shifts as a labor and delivery nurse that would leave me in a crash for days. Everything I was trying to do to heal seemed futile when I continued to crash like that. I decided to cut back on my hours at work and just focus on getting better.  

 

Finally I stumbled upon Curable, an app for chronic pain sufferers.  It taught me that the mind plays a large role in creating chronic pain, which I had seen for myself with my own mother.  I was finally getting somewhere.

 

I eventually began working with a coach trained in Pain Reprocessing Therapy. This is when things really began to change for me. I began to understand that the brain "learns fatigue," typically as a result of some kind of chronic stress or adverse events in life. Everything I was hearing just clicked with me; it made so much sense! Learning about the neuroscience behind my fatigue gave me the hope I was so desperate for.

 

​My coach suggested I read the book The Way Out by Alan Gordon, an LCSW who created the Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT).  Though I was not experiencing any pain, I learned how the techniques work for many different symptoms. Pain, fatigue, migraines, GI issues/IBS, Long Covid, and many more all fall into the category of neuroplastic symptoms. The good news is, if the brain learns these symptoms, it can unlearn them as well.

 

​Over time, I used these methods to heal myself. I can honestly say my life now is even better than before, because I learned the healing power of self compassion and the negative ripple effects fear and other negative thoughts can have on the body. I learned to change these patterns of fear that had contributed to this mess in the first place.

 

Over the past several years, I have learned so much about mind body symptoms and what it takes to get better. I am certified in Pain Reprocessing Therapy, am a Life Coach, and Heart Math Clinician. I combine these trainings as well as other knowledge I've gained along the way, to help clients find balance and calm their nervous system through a compassionate and holistic approach.