Meet Jill
She didn’t just study this work.
She lived it.
Coach · Speaker · Founder · Author
I’m not going to lead with my credentials.
I’m going to lead with the truth.
I attended 13 different schools before I graduated high school. Nothing was ever stable when it came to my parents.
My mother attempted suicide multiple times. My father’s anger was something I learned to navigate. He threw me out at 10. My mother did the same at 16. By 19, I was the one who walked away, not because I was done wanting a family, but because keeping them in my life would have left nothing of me.
You learn things in a childhood like that. You learn to read every room before you enter it. You learn that depending on someone is a liability. You learn that the only person you can count on is yourself.
I got very good at all of it. So good that by the time I was an adult, it just looked like strength.
What nobody saw, and what I couldn’t see, was that my nervous system never got the memo that the danger had passed. The hypervigilance. The self-reliance that kept everyone at arm’s length. The anxiety that lived just below the surface of a very successful life. I thought they were my Type A personality.
At 49, it finally caught up with me. I was diagnosed with PTSD.
Within a year, everything changed.
“Trauma is not the story of what happened. It is the moment your nervous system never got to finish.”
The Turning Point
After my PTSD diagnosis, I entered a year-long trauma treatment protocol with my therapist. It included three medically supervised MDMA-assisted sessions, combined with intensive preparation and integration work.
It was the most structured, demanding thing I have ever done. It was also the thing that finally worked.
Within a year, I no longer qualified for a PTSD diagnosis. What that process required, what it taught me, and what it made possible became the foundation of everything I do now.
The Method
How Heal the Moment Started
The Heal the Moment Method wasn’t built in a classroom. It was built in the specific moments I had to go back to during my own healing. Each one taught me something about how survival patterns form, and what it takes to heal them.
Here are three of the moments I healed. I share them because they show something important: the story we tell ourselves about who we are is rarely the truth. It is almost always an outdated childhood survival response.
The Moment
I was three years old when my father beat me, and then I could hear my mother’s screams as he beat her upstairs. For decades, I carried the belief that I was a mean person because I hadn’t gotten up to help her. When I went back to that moment, I found a three-year-old in survival mode, frozen with fear. She wasn’t mean. She was doing the only thing a child that age could do.
The Moment
I had to heal my mother’s suicide attempts. For years, I carried them as evidence that I wasn’t enough to make her stay. When I went back, I found something different. She wasn’t leaving me. She was trying to escape my father. Her desperation had nothing to do with me.
The Moment
My entire adult life, I organized around safety and security. Then I went back to a winter afternoon when I was ten. My father had thrown me out of the house without a coat. When I stepped into that memory as an adult, I could finally give that child what she needed. Protection. Presence. The fear that had been running my decisions for forty years began to lose its charge.
This is the work. Not just talking about the past, but going back to it with the resources you didn’t have then.
Those moments became the TRACE Process, the heart of Heal the Moment. And they taught me what I now call integration literacy: knowing how to read your own reactions, and what to do when an old moment shows up in an ordinary day.
In the Field
Conversations along the way
This work is bigger than any one of us. I’m grateful to learn alongside the people who built this field.
Rescuing Jill
Read the whole story.
My memoir is the full account of healing complex trauma and PTSD, and the role MDMA-assisted therapy played in reclaiming my life. It’s also where the Heal the Moment Method was born.
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