Seven years ago, I was high-functioning on the outside and unraveling on the inside.

I left my marriage not because of one big moment, but because of a thousand small ones that slowly erased who I was. I’d learned to be the strong one, the easy one, the woman who never needed anything. I adapted. I shrank. I became so good at surviving that I forgot how to feel like myself.

Then, just as I thought I was rebuilding, I was laid off from my executive nonprofit job — the role I believed made me safe, valuable, and secure. Gone in an instant.

I was a single mom to Madison and Damian, working multiple jobs, crying in the shower because it was the only private place left. Everyone said, “You just need rest,” or “Try yoga.” But rest didn’t touch it. Yoga didn’t touch it.

What I needed wasn’t more self-care.

I needed to understand who I had become in order to survive — and who I was underneath that.

So I started paying attention. Not to how to fix myself, but to how my patterns had formed. The over-functioning. The emotional containment. The constant self-monitoring. The way I stayed capable while disappearing inside my own life.

I studied psychology, learning and development, trauma-informed frameworks, and human behavior — not to become an expert, but to recognize myself. And then, slowly, to meet the parts of me that had been hidden behind survival.

That’s how The Spiral was born.

It gave language to what I’d been living:
Ashes — identifying the shield.
Ember — understanding why it exists.
Flame — seeing what it costs.
Rise — meeting the self underneath it.

As a process of disentangling identity from adaptation.