I’m a certified practitioner in a multitude of emotional, mental, physical and spiritual health and wellbeing modalities amassing thousands of in person classroom hours across the globe and countless in research.
I’ve been to more conferences, workshops, events, and ashrams than I can recall, and studied with and questioned some of the most prolific names on the planet. I’ve worked on cruise lines, and luxury hotels internationally, I've led corporate events and charity events, and owned a very successful studio in Lake Como Italy, serving The creme de la creme of Italian society including; athletes, footballer’s wives, surgeons, doctors, and high end fashion designers, to name a few. - Yet regardless of the successes, the truth is life challenges don’t discriminate, and sometimes despite how much we think we know life has other plans..at least it did for me.
The world, and my path is as much my classroom as my professional training; The pain, beauty, trials, and triumphs; the people, cultures, and customs I meet along the way are my lessons and my muse.
I’ve loved and hated my life, I’ve lived it and almost lost it. I’ve endured more than my fair share of challenges, adversity, extreme trauma, and mental health; Faced death, violation, violence, tragic loss and much of it…and I’ve ultimately learned to live side by side with them. I’ve witnessed joy, beauty and healing….and I’ve been grateful for them.
It’s been incredibly liberating and empowering taking the ultimate level of responsibility for my life, regardless of what’s been thrown at me, from whom, and from where. I’ve gained so much in surviving those challenges, believing every experience from the profoundly painful, to the miraculously magical have helped me become the compassionate, curious, perceptive, candid, Way shower, Truth Sayer, and Helper I am today.
Whatever decision or challenge you are facing I hope I can help you find the light in the darkness.
My clients share their lives, fears, challenges, desires, dreams...it's fair you know who I am...
I’d had an intimate relationship with trauma my entire life. Although I was deeply loved by my family, I was challenged by undiagnosed Autism. My eldest brother was very sick, and equally as challenged as me; consequently my home was usually like an unintentional war zone. When I was fourteen the man who I considered a god, my dad, was killed in a tragic explosion, falling thirty meters to his death. I don’t believe any of us knew how defining that day would be.
From that moment on tragedy followed me around like a shadow. In the space of ten years I was date drugged twice, assaulted and raped by a member of a powerful family in South Italy, raped by a military doctor in Rome while unconscious ( both of which had to be kept quiet). I was raped in relationship, on a train and domestically abused,
I was living with the impact of Complex PTSD, and then undiagnosed Autism and Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD essentially turned out to be the Complex Trauma but not before I got the demeaning label).
Almost living two realities - The one that was authentically happy and joyful and the one that consisted of extreme shame, self-harm, dissociation, meltdowns, and eating disorder to name a few. I was gripped in this polarising and psychological terror, but determined to fight and fit in I ‘dysfunctionally’ coped, and most of the time I wore my mask well, living a global and successful life helping people connect to their truth….but as much as I was trying I couldn’t connect to mine.
Finally in my later twenties, I endured three completely heart breaking second trimester miscarriages, and my marriage to the Captain of a large cruise line ended. I lost a very dear friend tragically, and sat helplessly with my brother John as he died in Intensive care at the age of 38 from major organ failure due to septicaemia. Years of over prescribed medication for his severe eczema and asthma, and ultimately his addiction to drink had wore his poor body down. I was beat, but after a shared death experience with John, I ‘knew’ it wasn’t my time…
After years of therapy I (somewhat) got my life together but too ashamed to tell the truth there was still so much I was hiding and still so much I was carrying. One day in his office I came out of my body watching from above and thought " I'm so sick of talking about me, he must be exhausted' and so I left.
Having always been spiritual and intuitive I became even more involved with mysticism, and my spiritual path. To add I was going back and forth to the USA and attending conferences and trainings on positive thinking, Law of Attraction, A course in Miracles...You name it I did it. For a while it worked but eventually and unfortunately the reach for infinite potentialities or manifesting my deepest desires, were just a step too far…. Virtually impossible to achieve and eventually doing nothing but feed my already deep trauma shame. ‘I’m not good enough.’ ‘It must be me’ I remained quiet determined to fit in, but torn inside unable to align the truth, and slowly worsening I made a reactive decision that would change the course of my life, and left my very successful studio in Italy, which I'd started ten years previous. It seemed the Universe forced my hand, and I was going to deal with my trauma, and ( then undiagnosed) disorder once and for all. I just didn’t know it yet.
It doesn’t make us weak, damaged, failing, or incompetent, if we get it ‘wrong’ or we seem imperfect. It just means we are struggling in that moment. No-one is ‘less than.’ Remembering at any given moment it could happen to us, is what makes us human, and how we handle it is not always how we think, or hope. I’m humbled in that thought.
DEBS
Going back to my hometown and intending to stay for just a few months, the next chain of events transpired that would determine a long few years - Systemic inflammation from a chronically overworked nervous system left me with severe anaemia, and a severe skin disease lasting years. I dislocated my shoulder, smashed my coccyx unable to walk for two months ,and lost the use of my pelvic floor for around 6 long months. My mental health symptoms and unresolved trauma, had been internalizing, not gone. I went from 100k a year to zero, lost virtually all of my money, my work, confidence, and the drive to do anything.
They say we all have a real breaking point and I finally met mine on a Sunday afternoon. I slept walked into a suicide attempt. The next moment, having no recollection of locating the number, picking the phone up, nor dialing it, I was screaming down the phone to the Crisis team. It seemed something was equally invested in keeping me here, or god wasn't giving up on me again...
Half an hour later the police and triage arrived, and eventually I was officially diagnosed. Although I was scared, it was as if I’d found the missing part of a jigsaw puzzle I’d been looking for forever, and I finally made sense.
Some weeks later I was lying in bed still wondering what I would tell people and in one single moment it was if I was shown the hand of grace and compassion I could easily give to others but not to myself. In a flash something shifted inside and I heard 'Put one breath in front of the other and keep your eyes on me.' Still, acknowledging my fear and the road to recovery ahead, I knew I wasn’t going to leap my way out of this - but I could live with that. ‘I think I’ll start again.’ I said. And I did.
Through intense work and feeling a safe way back into my body I gradually found an internal dialogue I could connect with as I started to re-learn how to live. Gradually rather than focus on the limitations of my (disorders)I started to pay attention to the positives and possibilities of their manifestations, and the resilience and genius I’d needed live with them. Slowly I started to untangle myself from the masses and create an inner stability that I could rely on for my strength, resolution, self-acceptance, and self- expression.
For all of my life and like most, I’d hidden so much of who I was, and the things that had been done to me for fear of being judged. I hid my diverse brain and pain until I didn’t know who I was anymore. Intuitively aware of how a label of mental health even innocently clouds judgment, I was afraid people would use the imperfect in me to cast a shadow on the beautiful, kind, compassionate, humorous, empathetic, creative, perceptive, intelligent, good, and yes ‘joyful’ I so easily and authentically was.
What I’d longed for was for people to see me in my fullness as much as my brokenness, my wholeness as much as my wounds, my fear as much as my courage, my joy as much as the down times. Regardless of how completely fragmented I was I still needed people to see my strengths, amazing capacities,
depth, and wisdom; Likewise, I needed people to really connect with me and witness the burden I carried, yet that compassion was hard to come by.
For those who knew me less they saw me as unsuccessful, struggling, broken, negative, erratic, confused, on a lower vibe, and lost. For those who knew me well, joyful and courageous, they saw it as something that would pass in an instant, I realised how difficult it was for even the most gifted of people, therapists and healers to hold those opposing energies.
What I know to be true in my heart, is life is so much more than this set of rules and guidelines, called ‘functioning’ which we agree to from birth to death. It’s an endless web of knowledge, felt experience, essence, simplicity and love. What I also know is our humanness applies to even the most ‘spiritual’ of us, and what makes us sanely human and profoundly spiritual, is understanding the path is also much more than seeking some grand version of love, its about learning to meet humanity in our struggle, in our differences - coming together not turning away.
DEBS
I’ve learned sometimes you have to face the death of what you thought your life would look like to invite something more beautiful and brighter in.
I understood the countless healing sessions and therapies I’d had over the years weren’t necessarily ineffective, they were just ineffective for me - at that time - because they took out of context my internal and external environment; my support system - and they were unable to hold me in my totality.
The experiences we have in life are not a linear progress of negative to positive because life can throw a curve ball at any time. Healing is not wrapped up in a nice little box after a set amount of time has elapsed. When some seem to ‘get over’ it quickly, this is not because they are the one’s who are tackling it better; doing more work, or ‘behaving’ well; and likewise someone who seems to take longer shouldn’t be viewed as it’s opposite - There are a million and one factors which come into play…
Witnessing, recognition, and compassion are not things we hold for another in one moment and dismiss in the next, because there seems to be two different stories playing themselves out; Two incongruence’s in whats presented in a personality. Life’s circumstances and energies are sometimes compelled to play themselves out in a given chapter or lifetime - it’s not our fault. I knew when I was five my life would be extraordinary, but I never once thought it would mean such intensity of suffering, and in that such unquantifiable loss.
It doesn’t make us weak, damaged, failing, or incompetent, if we get it ‘wrong’ or we seem imperfect. It just means we are struggling in that moment. No-one is ‘less than.’ Remembering at any given moment it could happen to us, is what makes us human, and how we handle it is not always how we think, or hope. I’m humbled in that thought.
What I know to be true in my heart is life is so much more than this set of rules and guidelines, called ‘functioning’ which we agree to from birth to death. It’s an endless web of knowledge, felt experience, essence, simplicity and love. What I also know is our humanness applies to even the most ‘spiritual’ of us. We have vocations, schools, parents, friends, relationships, social paradigms, conversations, loves, dislikes, pain, suffering and joy, and what makes us sanely human and profoundly spiritual, is understanding the path is much more than seeking some grand version of love, where we meet our soul and true essence, its also about learning to meet humanity in our struggle, in our differences - coming together not turning away. Empowered empathy is much more than walking in someone’s shoes, it’s being able to stay with someone’s energy even if it’s the opposite of ours - without losing ourselves in the mix.
How it ends and begins..
My life looks radically different to what I thought it would look like as a child, but I continue to grow, hope, flourish and feel the essence, ‘energetic aliveness’ and presence of the moment, and the ‘felt experience’ of life. Awakening has come around as a natural progression of my desire to be free of all that is false and the ‘Story of me’ - The story of suffering and the story of happy - I live in the raw, direct experience of each moment. Does this mean I am without challenge or deny challenge? No, but it does not rock my boat as much and visits less. Basically I found a sustainable way of living side by side with challenges, and still feeling joyful and expansive.
It’s been a long and humbling journey, and looking back I wonder if I could have done anything to change the timeline or course of my path, yet I essentially stayed so close and true to my journey, that I know there was a greater reason - I can see that now. I can see now how much more than my professional experience, it’s the experiential journey, sheer intensity of challenges, the success and the failures, and the innovations within them, which are the most transformative in my life and to the level of understanding, wisdom, presence, depth, and leadership I provide to my clients in their lives.
May you, like me, become a life living - loving, exploring, ‘resilience - ing,’ opening, embodying, and evolving…Your way…The way it’s supposed to be!
With love
Debs xo
