Welcome back to the place we find ourselves podcast. I'm Adam Young and I am joined today by my friend Rebecca Vickery. Rebecca, good to see you.

Good to see you.

Tell our listeners a little bit about where you are geographically and what you spend your time doing.

Yeah, I'm located on Pacific Northwest. I'm a therapist. I primarily work with folks who are working through religious trauma.

And I also work with the Allen Center. And I'm learning to call myself an artist. So that's been a new, exciting journey. And yeah, very interested to see where that will go.

Let's talk a little bit about story. How did you first get interested in story in general and your story in particular?

I have always been interested in story. I think there are some generational trauma in my family. And so even as a young child, I was really curious about trauma, curious about what makes people do the things they do or keep them from doing the things they're not doing.

And so and I started reading very young. So I started reading books about attachment and relationships and Christian counseling when I was like six or seven. So it is not a shock to anyone in my family that I'm a therapist.

As far as like my personal story work, that's been a lot longer of a process. I looking back, I can see like, oh, there's something that my body knew about my experiences and the way they had shaped me.

And some of, I can even see some of that interest that I had really being about trying to understand my own experience. But consciously, I was the person that said, like, I have a good childhood.

And I really wrestled with that, particularly as I moved into adolescence because I felt both simultaneously. I would often be up at night with a lot of panic attacks and anxiety and anxiety.

And feeling there's something wrong with me and I don't know what it is. And yet at the same time had this other experience that said, like, well, I must not be seeing my reality correctly.

That confusion was a pretty familiar experience. And then, well, at 19, I moved to work at a residential recovery program. It was originally an eight week internship that turned into a year long internship that turned into being on staff there for five and a half years.

And the program was based around the idea of healing in the context of a community. And so it was a year long program and the residents would come and they would live in these dorms for a year. And they saw counselors and they also had some group work together. And then they would work. It was a working farm.

And so the idea was you're getting healing in these spaces, but you're also experiencing healing and finding connection relationship.

One of the things that I noticed pretty early on was a lot of what these women are saying I resonate with. And I felt a lot of desire to be a resident there. And I didn't know what to do with that desire because I was hearing these stories that were horrific.

And yet, my that sense of like, well, I don't know if I can trust my own reality. So I don't know if I can trust that my experiences have been big enough or impactful enough for me to have the response that I'm having.

And so I was pretty conflicted and a couple years into my time there.

We had just a series of events within the program that were difficult and ended up leading to having a license.

Couts are come out and meet with the staff following that meeting. He went to the CEO and said, Hey, if you if you're willing to help fund this, like I'm willing to meet with some of the staff individually for 10 sessions.

And he had a list of names and my name was on them. So I started meeting with him. And that was really the start of a trajectory that has continued since that was a little over a decade ago.

And he was really the first person that put words to like, Oh, you have a story. And that was both really validating. And that was the beginning of that trajectory.

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