How Life Coach School Almost Killed Me

I want to tell you something. Life coaching school almost killed me. Maybe I’m exaggerating, but I said it, so also maybe it’s true.

It wasn’t the school’s fault. Martha Beck and her people did not advertise the Wayfinder life coach program as a place that taught its students how to guide themselves and others to ideal lives as well as how to negotiate trauma. In fact, from the start, there were very specific lines drawn between what coaches do and what therapists do. Broadly speaking, coaches were for present day and future thinking (dreams and schemes). Therapists were for what had happened in the past (trauma).

However.

Doesn’t it make sense that people with CPTSD, people like me, want to learn how to create their best lives, too? Don’t they want to dream of a more self/soul-driven future? Just because we’re adults carrying deep pockets of unprocessed, preverbal memories in our bodies and minds doesn’t mean we don’t want a life marked by freedom and peace, right?

I was tired of talking about my past and all my griefs, mostly because talking about them wasn’t making me feel better or special or empowered anymore. Talking about them felt like a habit, like eating a bunch of food I didn’t enjoy just to feel full so I could stop eating and rest.

I’d written a whole book about those things and then, for ten years, I’d helped hundreds of other people write books like mine. I made it my life’s work to help others tell their stories because believed in the power of story. I believed adopted people in particular needed to tell their stories in order to empower themselves, in order to find themselves, in order to set themselves free.

It wasn’t our fault we had unprocessed grief. All our lives our bodies and minds had been doing the best they could to protect us and keep us safe.

It was appearing that the more I wrote about past traumas and listened to others talk about theirs, the more adopted and trauma-bound I felt. Somewhere along the line, I’d gotten on the Trauma Train which was clearly headed for No Place Good. I wanted off. I wanted Good.

The problem was, I couldn’t imagine a future I wanted to live. It was like my brain had shut off its reward center for positive future thinking and had decided to keep me in the Prison of Darkness where the future did not look bright and I was trapped in old thinking because at least then I was safe.

So I signed up for life school.

I wanted out of this prison I had made of my own beliefs.

I had high hopes. Anything was possible if I was willing to work hard and change. Well, almost anything. Moms might not return, and I couldn’t relive my youth, but lots of other things could happen.

When I was in life school, I learned my stories did not matter. I was told stories are just thoughts created by the mind, words made of air. I could watch words and stories appear and disappear in my mind like clouds in the sky.

I went into a state that felt like shock. My stories felt more intrinsically mine than words appearing in my mind. They felt physical, like elements of my spine, my fascia, the muscles of my face and the bottoms of my feet. They felt like the fabric of my being. It was like I was hearing I could be in the group, but my skin did not hold any importance or truth.

My future depended on this school, I believed, and I had paid a lot of money to be there. There was no Plan B if I left. It felt as if staying was really the only chance I had to change. However, I could not be there without my stories, and so part of me lay on the couch and waited for time and my life to pass by while the other part did what it had always done—it put on a (pretty) good face and did (pretty much) what it was asked to do.