So, the answer to “What do you do?” is often determined by who you are and what you do, what we can do together:
I am a Craniosacral therapist focused on healing birth and attachment trauma.
I am a pre- and perinatal psychologist.
I am a baby whisperer. I teach mothers and fathers how to listen to their baby.
I am a researcher, synthesizer, and writer. All of my aptitude tests as young person said journalist.
I am a collaborator, networker, consensus builder, conflict resolution-er, and a community organizer.
I am a filmmaker, videographer, and editor.
I am an ARTIST. My whole life. Finally, I am doing it. And I am pulling my art and my other lives all together. That is what this website has been for me.
Kind of briefly, in the vein of pulling it all together, to make a long story a little shorter, because I feel like you need to know who I am if I am asking to engage with you on such a deep level.
So, here’s the low down on how I came to be doing my art and my soul portraits. I lived in seven states and my life in each were important and represent my very interesting journey. The longer story is in my bio sections to the left.
I grew up in Iowa, near Des Moines. I went to college, raised three of my 4 children, and worked post-grad in family support systems in Missouri.
In Missouri I earned a BS in psychology focused on biology with minor in art and a MA in Mental Health Counseling at Truman State University in Kirksville, MO. I began my post-grad career developing a family therapy program in the juvenile court. I was a therapist for children and families, mental health consultant for HeadStart, and I developed and directed a K-12 drug prevention program for 4 years while I raised three older children there. In 1994, my new husband’s work took us to Phoenix where I did field work for a master’s degree in conflict resolution and worked at the state level in system change. My dream.
People in Arizona (1994-5) and then in Illinois (1995-2005) knew me as a program director, community organizer, and a rabble rouser. That’s who New Yorkers (1999) knew me as and why they hired me. Thanks to a few of those NY’ers my dream job turned nightmare, and I was plunged into the work of healing of my trauma as a birthing baby and a birthing woman. I left as a whistleblower, never to work IN the system again. But I am available to address the system and support people working in it to serve babies and children.
Back in Illinois (2000), I reorganized, retrained, and regrouped. I began to teach mothers to do infant massage and I was a private practice craniosacral therapist. I am not a doula, though I was trained. Then and now, I attend birth to support the father and the baby as advocate and witness. I did newborn to adult craniosacral-based birth and attachment trauma integration.
Instead of getting out of “fighting the systems”, I realized that obstetric medical birth IS the system that needs reforming. Obstetric abuse is the core cause of all of our emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual issues.
A few years later, I moved to Columbia, Missouri (2005-2013) to be near my father and mother in their 80s, and to work as a team member with a home birth physician. That was the plan. But God laughed at the last part. Instead, I made an amazing film. After that clinical opportunity was not viable, and as my son deployed to Iraq and my grandson and daughter were brutalized in his birth, I blogged my heart out about war and birth. I became aware that making birth safe (ending obstetric abuse of babies) was my mission. I planned a sweet little film showing the difference between home birth babies’ experience and hospital birthed babies, with the information about how we are impacted by birth. It turned into a six-part docu-series, “The Other Side of the Glass: a birth film for and about men protecting birth.”
My grandson was a vaginal birth after cesarean (VBAC), in Arizona, were homebirth of VBAC was illegal. So, based on creating a plan with a female OB known to support VBAC, my daughter and I prepared for “homebirth in the hospital.” It was a brutal experience. My 12-year-old daughter filmed her nephew’s birth. His father and I - grandma - were powerless. Two years later I set out to make a film about how fathers are so disempowered by the medical establishment and unable to protect their family. I wondered, “What do men do with their pain and anger?”
So Missouri would know me as much as a filmmaker and as a radio show host on public radio (Thought Crime Radio: Voices for the Human Rights of Babies) than a craniosacral therapist. I lived there eight years total while traveling for two years doing my independent film, The Other Side of the Glass: a birth film for and about men. I released it in June of 2013. I lived in northern California for up six months at a time three times during my training and filmmaking, and working with my mentor, 2002-2015.
People in Washington DC where I’ve lived since 2015, people don’t know me much, other than as my daughter’s mom, and her business manager and videographer and editor, but DC is learning to know me as an artist. Here, I am producing art and written work, and am available to provide craniosacral therapy with fathers after a traumatic birth.
My daughter and I are working on another film, working title, “Kendra Was the Child” about James Prescott, PhD, neurobiologist NIHCD researcher who was wrongfully terminated in early 1980 after a five year fight to keep his research going, even while it was well received and his research on child abuse rooted in the disruption of the mother-baby connection was scrubbed. It might have something to do with his fame in the academic, political, and media world peaking at the same time Larry Flynt found Jesus, thanks to Ruth Carter Stapleton (President Jimmy’s sister) and Flynt promised to stop degrading women. Flynt found Prescott’s work and commissioned an article about abused children in Hustler magazine and unfortunately, was shot not long after. While he slipped into addiction during recovery and his wife reversed all the efforts he’d made, Flynt did not make good on his offer to support James if he was fired. The film is “in the can” (hard drive) and we seek funding to support us to complete it.
Meanwhile, I do adult craniosacral therapy for people who have experienced an accident - bikes and falls, etc. And, I am good at it. If you live in Washington and have a bicycle wreck, are hit by a car, please contact me for session.
So, you want the usual worldly credentials?
I hold a BS in Psychology and Art and an MA in Counseling from Truman State University, Kirksville MO, and all-but-thesis MA in Conflict Resolution from McGregor School of Antioch, Yellow Springs, OH.
From 1985-1994, I was a child-family therapist, program director, and community organizer. I completed course work for master’s in conflict resolution at Antioch College, Yellow Springs. 1994-96. I have a background in mediation and collaboration of groups from community to state level - IL, AZ, and NY. In late 1999-2000 I began to study and practice craniosacral therapy 2002-04, and through 2006 I studied pre and perinatal psychology, primal and newborn neural development, and mother-baby attachment healing with founders of the work.
I have worked almost forty years to empower women and children, and men, in the myriad human support systems. I began my career in juvenile justice developing a family therapy program in 1985 where I first realized the need for asset-based systems change via grassroots leadership. I was a leader in local, statewide, and national projects in four states through 1999. I also developed the second known program for men (batterers) in violent relationships in 1991. I worked as an aide to a psychologist working with men in the VA mental health system from 1974-76.
Today I am an artist, a pre and perinatal psychologist/therapist, filmmaker, all focused on the mother-baby relationship at birth as the foundation of our environmental and behavioral issues. I write and teach about the consciousness of newborns and preserving the baby-mother environment at birth; and, I advocate for the creative reform of systems to support babies and mothers to protect the newborn human’s first experience of his or her environment outside the womb.
My film, The Other Side of the Glass: a film for and about men, brought the needs of and the disempowerment of the father to the discussion.
I write and blog about the duality of the either/or conflict and the thinking that keeps us polarized in debates - always focused on who the human baby is and has a right to.
In late 1999, I left my “dream job” of “changing the system” after fifteen years of working in a myriad of social programs. This climax of work coordinating state-level and state-wide effort to reform the system from within in New York placed me on a path of healing my own disempowerment as a woman. My first birth at age 18 was a very drugged and violent experience and it defined me as a mother, woman, and wife. But I didn’t know that at the time. Our culture is set up so that we women learn not to trust our body or our perception of the experience of the abuse of it. The so-called “rape culture” starts here - in how we treat birthing women and their babies.
In January 2000, I trained in infant massage therapy and CranioSacral therapy and decided to return to direct work with mothers and babies to focus on attachment with the stated goal “to keep them out of the system in the first place.” I also focused on the raising of my last child who I homeschooled some years, while I studied from 2002-4 under Ray Castellino, the founder of prenatal and birth trauma healing. The Castellino method is a hybrid of Craniosacral, Polarity Therapy, Chiropractic, and Peter Levine’s somatic trauma healing, and recent neurological findings from researchers such as Allan Shore.
Since 2000 I have supported hundreds of mama-baby and fathers around the country, Europe, and Canada. In 2002 I met David Chamberlain, author of “The Mind of Your Newborn Baby” and that year I became a founding member of Dr. and Mrs. Chamberlain’s local collective, Birth and Early Parenting Educators (BEPE). I was a mentee of Dr. Chamberlain until he passed away in May 2014. Dr. Chamberlain, the co-founder of the Association for Pre and Perinatal Psychology and Health (APPPAH), is the featured expert professional in my film, The Other Side of the Glass.
Dr. Chamberlain and I connected deeply around our passion for the Soul. Everything I do now is from the perspective of the soul coming into human form and having a physiologic need and right to have an easy, peaceful, gentle reconnection to the mother. The mother’s body is the first environment.
Our lifelong journey and relationships are defined by neural roots that formed during the primal period - conception, gestation, labor and birth, and infancy. This is where we must go to heal what impacts us today.
See my curriculum vitae here. I changed my name in early 2000 so if you want to verify me, you’ll need my given name.