As a child, Joy experienced domestic violence. In adulthood, after the tragic loss of her five-year-old daughter Melia and then, three years later, the unexpected death of her husband from an aneurysm, Joy spent the next few years in a state of shock.
“It was crazy,” she says. “It almost destroyed me. I couldn’t sleep. My nerves were frazzled. I kept having these heart palpitations, anxious sweating, nausea and headaches, and chronic pain. Even though I remained highly functioning as a construction architect, inside I was shaking to the bone.”
Diagnosed with complex PTSD, she went to several medical doctors for help. But the one-size-fits-all, “standard of care” approach failed to provide what she needed.
“They all kept saying,‘Here, take these antidepressants.’ And I was like, ‘ don’t want antidepressants…
