Hi! I'm Melissa

For most of my life, I lived in survival mode without knowing it. Chronic back pain, anxiety, digestive issues, depression—my body was screaming at me, but I didn't know how to listen. I thought I wasn't intelligent. I thought something was fundamentally wrong with me. What I didn't understand then was that my nervous system was doing exactly what it learned to do: protect me at all costs.

I believed getting healthier meant fixing my body from the outside in.

So I became a Certified Personal Trainer and Corrective Exercise Specialist. I helped hundreds of clients transform physically—lose weight, build strength, move better. But I started noticing something: the clients who experienced the deepest, most lasting transformations weren't just changing their bodies. They were changing their relationship with their bodies. The real work wasn't happening in the gym. It was happening in the safety of being truly seen.

When my son Cannon was born in 2015, my own protective walls crumbled.

Becoming a mother opened something in me I'd kept carefully locked away. The hypervigilance, the perfectionism, the constant need to control—all the strategies that kept me functional but disconnected—suddenly weren't sustainable. I had a C-PTSD diagnosis, years of traditional talk therapy under my belt, and more self-help books than I could count. I understood my trauma intellectually. But my body was still living in it.

That's when everything changed. I learned the truth that redirected my entire life and career:

You cannot think your way out of a nervous system response.

I went back to school and earned my Master's in Social Work. I pursued specialized training in Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapy, Applied Polyvagal Theory, and Internal Family Systems. I studied how trauma lives in the body and, more importantly, how the body heals when we stop trying to control it and start learning to connect with it. I became certified in yoga therapy, meditation, Asian bodywork, and trained as a doula. Every certification taught me something valuable. But my own healing—the messy, non-linear, embodied kind—taught me what actually works.

Here's what I know now:

Your nervous system isn't broken. It's brilliant. The anxiety, the shutdown, the hypervigilance, the people-pleasing, the chronic pain—these aren't character flaws or things you need to fix. They're protective strategies your body developed to keep you alive. And they worked. You're here.

But survival strategies that once protected you can become prisons. And the way out isn't through more control, more discipline, or more understanding. It's through reconnection.

Regulation doesn't mean calm. It means connection and choice.

Connection to yourself. To your body. To your emotions. To the people around you. And choice—the ability to respond instead of being hijacked by reaction. Choice is the closest we'll ever get to control, and it only happens when we're connected.

I created Connected Healing and the S.A.F.E. Method because I needed an approach that actually worked in real life.

Not rigid protocols you force yourself through when you're already dysregulated. Not techniques that work in theory but fall apart when you're triggered. I needed tools that were simple, body-based, and repeatable. Tools grounded in neuroscience and trauma research, but accessible enough to use when you're in the middle of a panic attack or shutdown.

The S.A.F.E. Method is that tool. It's a proprietary 4-step framework I developed by synthesizing decades of trauma research—Polyvagal Theory, Internal Family Systems, Somatic Experiencing, and Attachment Theory—into something you can actually use when your nervous system is hijacked. It moves stuck emotions in minutes while building three types of connection for lasting regulation.

Connected Healing is the platform where I teach this methodology. It's where people come to understand that healing doesn't happen all at once. It happens a little bit at a time, often. Through small, sustainable practices that build capacity instead of demanding perfection. Through understanding that your body isn't the enemy—it's been trying to save you all along.

This work isn't about becoming someone new. It's about reconnecting with who you've always been underneath the protection.

I would love to hold space for you, exactly as you are.