In the depth of my most prolonged survival phase, I hauled myself out of bed in the morning with the promise that I could nap when I got home. I felt the heaviness of life even as the alarms blared me out of sleep. There wasn’t a day when the morning air didn’t pin me to the bed and invite me to stay.

In those days, the only bits of Kelli showing up had engineer stamped all over them. Even the parts of me that hold the compassion and the whimsy limited their expression to things that might be found with an engineer stamp. Life taught me that only these bits were safe to share.

I chaffed against the limits. I selectively pushed passed my drawn lines of safety. Stepping into and out of relationships, environments, and groups as I worked to expand my expression of myself.

Early on in my journey, I searched for something more. More what, I didn’t know. 

I began by identifying pieces of what made me Kelli. As I collected more pieces, the path changed to finding a way to make the pieces work together. I’d found so many parts - like the engineer, the momma bear, and quiet comic relief, to name just a few - that integration felt like a pipe dream for a while. 

Then, I found my key in two very different places.

In shamanic circles, I learned and experienced welcoming home younger pieces of myself. The two-year-old who never wanted to sleep at night led the way. In a music lead breathwork, she showed me the night she started fading. With help and guidance from my teachers, my imagination, and the things my body remembered, I joined her at the top of the stairs and gave her the acceptance and affection she needed that night. Sometimes, we end up at the top of the stairs together, with my heart rebreaking and her essence and energy settling into me.

In the learning around trauma I’ve been doing as part of my coaching training, I’ve come to understand that I experienced my childhood as being filled with emotional neglect. To make myself as safe as possible as a child, I began tucking things away and molding myself into the kid I thought my parents wanted. Humans want to live as much as any other creature. When you add that survival imperative to a being that’s been making meaning since we first landed, the stories we tell ourselves can be wonderful or horror filled. Childhood trauma often leaves us with horror-filled stories about who we are and what we have to do to ourselves to survive.

The solution ends up being the same for both of these healing spaces. Find the younger parts of yourself, acknowledge and affirm what they experienced, appreciate them for doing what they had to do to keep living, and accept them into your life today. The how of accomplishing that can differ significantly.

These first moments of connection between the 45-year-old me and the four-year-old me shifted my healing path from integration to wholeness. As more of my younger versions make themselves known, I’ve come to understand that these pieces link together all the parts I’d found as an adult. When I sit with them, listening to their stories and then reclaiming them as mine - each of them a piece of me to be seen and honored - the disparate parts don’t look like they came from so many different places. 

When I think about holding space for people, I don’t think about traveling with them on some search for authenticity, and I’m not really sure what highest and best even means. No, I want to help people live each moment with as much of themselves present in the moment as possible. So, join me on a journey of reclaiming parts of you hidden or quieted so you can be as whole as possible.