Born on a Monday

Note: If you want to get a sense of where I’m at and who I am, this “2023 summary” blog post will probably help.

Hi, I am Marie LePage and I am a homo sapiens. Over the last 3.5 years I have been doing some deep work within myself and in my relationships to understand how my biofamily, religious, and gender experiences shaped who I present myself to be and how I think. I have been working to heal myself from what my nervous system learned within chronically unsafe situations and having unsafe identities and thoughts.

The name for what I do has many terms. Healer, coach, counselor, space-holder, listener, co-conspirator, truth-teller, friend. The best description I’ve found for my work can be found in chapter 2 , page 36 of “Understanding and Healing Emotional Trauma” which speaks about people who help others do the inner work necessary to heal emotional trauma:

“Anybody who facilitates healing must know about shame, and the only way that knowledge can be attained is through personal, embodied, right-hemisphere, implicit experience. Moreover, those who help us heal must have come to know their own shame, not because it was a requirement of their training but because it was utterly necessary to their lives, and their own emotional healing… Rather than hiding behind a therapeutically passive and distant professional persona, she has to be in the healing relationship… the healer and the person looking for healing must come together as two human beings, each with their own struggles, frailties, fallibilities, and vulnerabilities. There must be mutuality and reciprocity.”

I grew up in a household of emotional neglect and within an evangelical Christianity community of the 80’s and 90’s in white, midwestern America. I had never felt okay or safe internally or externally, which for decades I thought was “normal” and what everyone else was experiencing. But it turned out my experiences created an experience within me that some call “complex post traumatic stress disorder”. Most of my life has been overwhelming and mentally exhausting due to the internal noise of profound shame, existential shock and terror, and fear/unfamiliarity of my own thoughts. I’ve spent decades miserable, ruminating, lost in my mind, masking in society, disconnected from my body, angry at religion, angry at my family, distrustful of the world and pessimistic about the future. And I masked most of that, even from myself.

In the fall of 2020, I tried psilocybin for the first time and began the process of becoming Self-aware. Due to religious trauma and other anti-human cultural narratives of my generation, I hadn’t known what thoughts were, what having an “internal family system” was, how to identify or feel feelings feelings, what psychological defenses were, what awareness was, and what it means to “be human”. This has been an incredibly painful journey where I’ve begun to integrate how much of my experience (past and present) I’d had to protect myself from in order to survive the trauma from my childhood. This process has involved forms of despair such as derealization, depersonalization, constant anxiety, fearing I am insane, and suicidal ideation.

I had taken a pause from public speaking and pursuing coaching clients as I have been going through my own “dark night of the soul” over the last few years. I’ve been discovering repressed trauma and processing it privately with people I was building my first secure/authentic relationships with. This has been a very raw experience that I didn’t want to share about publicly. However, this process has given me a perspective that allows me to see what others are going through and help them see it as well and I’ve returned to coaching again and find myself to be more effective than ever at supporting my clients/friends. I have made some major strides in pulling my Self back together and I want to start working more actively with those who are on this journey, too.

This is the coaching work that I do. In my own process, I have seen the power of deep listening; non-hierarchical support; supporting the development of autonomy, intuition, and awareness; and nervous system regulation techniques. I bring all of this personal, embodied knowledge with me in my coaching. I do not seek to become a licensed therapist nor credentialed coach. I am offer myself to you as a candid, authentic, living-it-myself human who will be honest with you and treat you with the respect and autonomy you deserve and have regardless of whether you believe you do. I will share from my own pain and experience as well. Within myself, I nurture (not only in sessions with clients but every moment I can for myself) curiosity, presence, awareness, honesty, openmindedness, non-judgment, and acceptance.

If you like qualifications, here’s some stuff for ya. I administered and facilitated of an ex-religious support group in the Twin Cities for over 10 years. I have also led breakout sessions at MNPolyCon, have been facilitating a support group for ethical non-monogamy practitioners, and began the Dying Out Loud movement with Dave Warnock. I served on the Board of MNPoly from 2022-2023. Additionally, I run/have run my own entrepreneurial endeavors in podcasting, photography, life coaching, blogging, public speaking, and making art!