Services
Speaking: Workshops & Retreats
Workshops & Speaking
Experiential learning spaces that use art, movement, music, and reflection to help people engage healing and growth together.
Deep-Dive Talks & Guided Processing (Book-Based)
These sessions are designed for audiences seeking depth, reflection, and guided processing—not just information.
The Art of Self-EMDR: A Guided Deep Dive
Processing trauma with creativity, structure, and choice
An experiential presentation designed to help participants work with the material—not just learn it. Drawing from The Art of Self-EMDR series, this talk offers guided reflection, gentle bilateral stimulation options, and creative exercises that support safe, contained processing. Participants leave with a clearer understanding of how to engage healing without overwhelm or isolation.
Attachment After Religious Trauma
Healing relational patterns shaped by fear, control, and compliance
A focused exploration of attachment wounds formed in authoritarian or abusive religious environments. This talk helps participants recognize survival-based relational strategies, understand how they developed, and begin cultivating safer, more flexible patterns of connection—with themselves, others, and the sacred.
From Compliance to Connection
Relearning attachment after coercive faith systems
Grounded in trauma psychology and attachment theory, this deep dive helps participants differentiate obedience from safety, submission from connection, and certainty from trust. Drawing from Deborah’s clinical work and writing, the session supports participants in loosening inherited relational patterns while preserving personal agency and dignity.
Working With Your Story
Guided processing for readers of The Art of Self-EMDR Writing
Designed for book groups, retreats, and recovery programs, this session helps participants slow down and metabolize traumatic memories through the use of guided memoir writing and self-EMDR exercises. Deborah offers structured prompts, attachment-informed guidance, and relational framing to help readers engage deeply with the material while maintaining nervous system safety.
Wife Material: Processing the Story Beneath the Story
Attachment, identity, and spiritual development after fundamentalism
Using Wife Material as a shared text, this talk supports participants in reflecting on their own stories of identity formation, belonging, and loss. The focus is not on critique, but on meaning-making, relational repair, and forward movement after rigid belief systems.
Healing Attachment Wounds Without Losing Who You Are
Repair after religious trauma
This talk addresses the fear many survivors carry—that healing requires erasing who they once were. Drawing from Deborah’s clinical and creative work, the session focuses on honoring adaptive survival strategies while gently reshaping attachment patterns toward greater safety and connection.
Retreats
Immersive, trauma-informed experiences for faith communities and groups, designed to support integration, connection, and spiritual development.
Retreat Overview
Healing, Connection, and Spiritual Development
This retreat offers a spacious, trauma-informed approach to spiritual growth—one that honors both faith and the emotional lives of the people who carry it. Designed for church communities and faith-based groups, the experience weaves together psychology, creativity, and reflective spiritual practice to support healing from fear-based religious experiences while fostering deeper relational connection.
Participants engage in a thoughtfully paced sequence of art sessions, music, gentle movement, and guided writing prompts, each designed to support nervous system regulation and meaning-making without pressure to disclose or perform healing. These creative practices are accessible to all—no artistic or musical background required—and emphasize curiosity, choice, and self-attunement.
Throughout the retreat, participants are invited into small-group sharing that prioritizes safety, listening, and respect. Sharing is always optional and guided by clear relational boundaries, allowing connection to emerge without emotional overwhelm. Brief, mini self-EMDR exercises are introduced as optional tools to help participants gently process emotional material and restore a sense of internal balance. These practices are carefully framed for educational and spiritual reflection—not therapy—and are adaptable to a wide range of comfort levels.
Rather than focusing on belief change, the retreat supports spiritual development through integration—helping participants differentiate fear from reverence, compliance from trust, and isolation from belonging. The overall tone is grounded, compassionate, and quietly hopeful, offering space for grief, insight, and renewal while strengthening the relational fabric of the community.
A Retreat for Healing, Connection & Spiritual Growth
An invitational, trauma-informed experience for faith communities and communities of care:
This retreat is designed for people who want to explore spiritual growth in ways that feel safe, grounded, and relational. It offers space to reflect on faith, emotion, and connection—especially for those who have been shaped by fear-based or overly rigid religious environments.
You do not need to be in crisis.
You do not need to share your story.
You do not need to have answers.
You are invited to come as you are.
What This Retreat Is
This retreat weaves together psychological insight, creativity, and gentle spiritual reflection. Rather than focusing on belief change, the emphasis is on integration—helping participants understand how faith has been experienced in the body, emotions, and relationships, and how healing supports deeper spiritual maturity.
Throughout the retreat, participants will be guided through a sequence of experiences that support nervous system regulation, reflection, and connection—always at their own pace.
What We’ll Do Together
Participants will be invited into a variety of optional, accessible practices, including:
- Art sessions using color, shape, and simple materials (no artistic skill required)
- Music and sound for grounding, reflection, and emotional regulation
- Gentle movement to support presence and embodiment
- Guided writing prompts for personal meaning-making
- Small-group reflection focused on listening and respect, not fixing or advising
- Mini self-EMDR exercises, offered as brief, optional tools for calming and integration
All activities are designed to be contained, respectful, and choice-based. Participants are always free to adapt, observe, or opt out of any exercise.
What This Is Not
To help set clear expectations, this retreat is:
- Not therapy
- Not a deconstruction workshop
- Not a space for debate or persuasion
- Not emotionally confrontational or cathartic by design
This is an educational and reflective experience, grounded in psychological safety and spiritual respect.
About Mini Self-EMDR Exercises
Mini self-EMDR practices are brief, guided exercises drawn from trauma-informed psychology. In this retreat, they are used solely for grounding, reflection, and nervous system support, not for deep trauma processing. Participation is always optional, and exercises are adapted for group and spiritual settings.
STORYTELLING GROUPS & RETREATS
Storytelling Circles
Informed by my facilitator training with the Austin Story Project—rooted in the work of Mark Yaconelli and in partnership with Austin Seminary—I offer storytelling circles as a way for communities to engage pressing issues through presence rather than debate. These circles create structured, spacious environments where participants share lived experience instead of arguments, allowing connection to form through attentive listening and mutual respect. Particularly within church communities, groups of therapists, or other settings navigating tension, transition, or collective stress, storytelling helps shift the emotional tone from polarization to relational understanding. The process is gently guided, trauma-informed, and grounded in clear boundaries, making space for vulnerability without pressure. When people are invited to tell and hear stories in this way, communities often discover that what felt divisive begins to feel human—and that deeper connection becomes possible.