About Anchor Point Alpha

 As your coach, I would like to introduce myself with the most transparency and authenticity I can provide since you are embarking on a journey that involves a great deal of trust and vulnerability. I worked in the behavioral health field from 2007 until early 2024. After years of working in the field, I started questioning what I was doing and why I was doing it. I didn’t study all those years to appease insurance companies and mitigate liability but this is where I found myself. I realized I was being shoved into a box that was impossible to fit into and it threatened my authenticity. I wanted to legitimately see people heal. I have struggled with depression most of my life, spent many years struggling with self-harm, planned my death more times than I can count, and survived sexual assault. Through all of this, I recognized so many limitations in the system I had spent all my time working in and was determined to do something different. I couldn’t even find healing for myself there. I didn’t want to see survivors of trauma and people in the darkest of places stuck in the lie that healing isn’t possible, that they could only hope to reach a point of becoming “stable” at best. I have learned that while trauma shattered the narrative I had built for my life, I can be so much more than stable, using those broken pieces to rebuild my identity and purpose into what it was meant to be all along. Aside from my personal trauma driving me to where I find myself today, I have always been driven by my passion for helping veterans. My dad was a Vietnam Veteran who unfortunately never found peace from his experience prior to his death in 2021. I was raised in a town surrounded by veterans and found so much vitality in learning how to become a better person through talking with them. Whenever I reached the most desperate places of hopelessness and everyone else had fled, I would find the hand of a warrior reaching out to save me. They met me in that darkness with courage and a sense of personal responsibility that most others lacked. It’s a debt that can never be repaid and I can only hope to reach others in the darkness the way they were able to reach me. I will never pretend to have all of the answers (for myself or you) but all these experiences have built who I am today and I continue to work at fortifying that each day.        

  There are many misperceptions about coaching vs therapy, and I would like to take the time to clarify the similarities and differences between the two. I’ll first start with credentials. To become a therapist, one must not only possess a master’s degree, but that individual also needs to obtain clinical supervision for licensure. Is that the right approach? Does education and certification truly qualify everyone for this work? The key questions I ask are, “what is the desired outcome, what is needed, and what goals do we have?” I do have a master’s degree, but it is an M.A in Psychology, but that kind of degree program does not provide a clear pathway for therapy licensure, like a Master’s of Social Work or M.A. in counseling would. During my time working in behavioral health, I worked under the license of other individuals in the organization when providing behavioral health services. Coaches do not need this advanced credentialing, though certifications in different coaching niches are available and recommended. Therapists must also practice therapy in the state they are licensed while coaches can meet with anyone anywhere. The focus also differs between coaches and therapists. While both will assist in developing awareness and strategies for the present to improve the future, a therapist will often focus greatly on processing past experiences. Coaches meet their clients in the present to get them to where they wish to be next. They focus on helping clients clarify goals, identify obstacles, and create action plans. With trauma specific coaching, the work is focused on the client’s life in the present and how trauma is affecting the ability to meet goals as opposed to processing the past trauma itself. A coach’s process is oriented towards action and results as opposed to treating mental illness and gaining understanding of how the past impacts the present. Both coaches and therapists intend to empower people, but they work to achieve this in different ways. Therapists are qualified to assess, diagnose, and treat mental illness. Coaches are not healthcare providers and cannot diagnose or treat conditions. Due to this difference, coaches do not bill insurance companies as most clinical therapists do. Therapy goals are determined by “medical necessity” that is needed for billing while coaching goals are client driven. In coaching, this allows for the solution to be cocreated between coach and client. 

  Sessions will range from 45 minutes to an hour. We will begin with a basic intake form but I will also begin by creating two radar charts to provide a visual of where we are starting. One radar chart shows 6 components of Self or what we will call Blue Force Tracker. We will use that to measure hope, purpose, self-concept/identity, growth, vitality, and love/belonging (our allies). This will provide a baseline for us to develop goals in our work together. A strong, coherent identity serves as an anchor, giving us a sense of direction, stability, and hope for the storm to pass. The second radar chart will be our Red Force Tracker. We will look at avoidance, shame, isolation/loneliness, lizard brain thoughts/cognitive distortions, emotional awareness/regulation, and trauma reactivity (potential enemies). The human brain is an amazing thing and it tries desperately to protect us, but sometimes it doesn’t work in the best way to help. It can at times be our worst enemy. There is part of your brain that helps us avoid things that hurt us, teaches us not to touch hot stoves, and remembers traumas from the past. Anatomically, it is the midbrain, the primitive brain, or as I like to call it, the lizard brain. This part takes all your fears, insecurities, and pain to warn you against traumatic things from happening again. Unfortunately, we don’t hear the messages the way they’re intended. Instead, we hear accusation, pain, hopelessness, burden. Ultimately, these impulses lead us to behavioral and thought patterns that impact identity and purpose. Looking at this will allow us to start examining the relationship between this enemy takeover and the areas of self that are being suppressed. Trauma is often labeled trauma due to the loss or threat of loss that accompanies it. When a person loses something integral to their sense of self, they may question their purpose and identity. Traumatic events can shatter previously held beliefs, alter perceptions of safety and self-worth, and challenge an individual’s sense of reality. This disruption can lead to an identity crisis where individuals struggle to reconcile their past experiences with their present selves. This collapse can be immobilizing and hinder an individual’s ability to move forward. Injury to identity and purpose changes the story we tell ourselves about who we are and this in turn impacts the choices we make and relationships we have. I’m here to tell you that we can change the story. It is a commonly held belief that recovery from trauma means returning to who you were prior to that trauma. The truth is, you are different after trauma. The fact is that trauma happened and nothing will make that unhappen. However, the past does not need to define you and the identity you build in the aftermath of trauma is where you can find healing and paths that you never expected to exist. Come join me in this journey of finding hope and rebuilding your SELF.